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Lincoln University Digital Thesis
Copyright Statement
The digital copy of this thesis is protected by the Copyright Act 1994 (New Zealand).
This thesis may be consulted by you, provided you comply with the provisions of the Act and the following conditions of use:
you will use the copy only for the purposes of research or private study you will recognise the author's right to be identified as the author of the thesis and
due acknowledgement will be made to the author where appropriate you will obtain the author's permission before publishing any material from the
thesis.
The Sustainability Imperative and
Urban New Zealand:
Promise and Paradox
A thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
at
Lincoln University
by
Suzanne A. Vallance
Lincoln University
2007
Abstract
Abstract of thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
The Sustainability Imperative and Urban New Zealand: Promise and Paradox
by S. A. Vallance
'Urban sustainability' is an increasingly ubiquitous term now featuring in all manner
of policy documents and promotional material. As an ambitious attempt to address
social, economic and bio-physical environmental issues it appears to balance
philanthropic ideals, such as social development, with environmental concern and
fiscal efficiency. Yet, my research involving in-depth interviews with 35 urban
practitioners in Christchurch, New Zealand, exposes much of the apparent consensus
around its meaning as illusory.
Though the concept's promise rests on an apparently neutral reconciliation of
disparate goals and aspirations, it is conceptually paradoxical, difficult to implement
and extremely political. While the orthodox tripartite promotes a combination of
social, economic and environmental elements, I have found practitioners tend to
emphasise bio-physical aspects of the concept. As a corollary, urban sustainability is
often reified as a technical problem to be managed within certain budget constraints. ~\
The ways in which the concept is quite literally made concrete in our cities and towns
naturalises certain social arrangements, such as, for example, the spatial segregation
of different groups. The processes of reification also serve to legitimise particular
rationalities, one of which encourages a particular reading of 'the environment' that
rests on an unhelpful and possibly dangerous separation of nature and the city.
In this thesis I use techniques associated with discourse analysis and symbolic
interaction, informed by an eclectic literature around social geography, and urban
political economy and ecology, to explore and elaborate upon these themes.
Key Words: Urban sustainability, the city, sustainable cities, social sustainability, urban political ecology, the built environment, social geography
ii
Acknowledgements
The research and writing of this thesis has been, at times, incredibly difficult and the
fact that I've survived the experience can be attributed to a number of people and
organisations. First, I would like to acknowledge the Lincoln University staff and
students who have encouraged and motivated, clarified and contributed over the years.
My supervisors, Harvey Perkins and Jacky Bowring, have my sincere thanks for their
outstanding guidance and well-placed advice. Jacky's spaciness has sent me to
sources that I truly appreciated, even if my attempts to emulate them were woefully
inadequate. I simply cannot recall a meeting with Harvey that has not left me inspired
and with renewed enthusiasm for my work!
I am very grateful for the financial support I have received from the Royal Society of
New Zealand, the Freemasons, the Centre for Housing and Research Aotearoa New
Zealand, the Resource Management Law Association, Building Research Capacity in
the Social Sciences, and Lincoln University whose Doctoral Scholarship made this
possible. The significance of these contributions far exceeded their monetary value; in
addition to allowing me to focus on my research, they helped me keep faith in the
worthiness of the project and created an almost manic determination to see it through
to the end and repay such generosity with conceptual fruit.
At those (frequent) times at wit's end, I would turn to friends and family. Thank you
for listening to my pressure-valve, garbled attempts to explain my work without trying
to medicate with anything stronger than riesling. A special thanks to Darryl, whose
irreverent humour puts things in perspective, and to Zac, who has created merry havoc
and made me think about sustainability in a whole new way ...
iii
Table of Contents
Declaration ...................................................................................................................... i Abstract .......................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... iv Table of Figures ............................................................................................................ vi Chapter One: Introduction ............................................................................................. 1
The Nature of Things ................................................................................................. 4 Truth and reality .................................................................................................... 7 The political ecology of nature ............................................................................ 14 Dwelling with nature ........................................................................................... 18 Hegemonic nature and the environment .............................................................. 20
Science and Sensibility ............................................................................................ 23 Everyday Life as Location and Process ................................................................... 25 Thesis Overview ...................................................................................................... 28
Chapter Three: The Rationalities of Sustainability - Some Slippery Concepts .......... 41 Early Conceptualisations of Sustainability .............................................................. 43 The Brundtland Report and Sustainable Development ........................................... 45
Limits to growth or the growth oflimits? ........................................................... .4 7 Economic, Bio-physical Environmental and Social Sustainability ......................... 51
Reconciling Sustainability ....................................................................................... 63 Economic growth versus economic development ............................................... 63 Ecological modernisation versus risk .................................................................. 65 Other critiques ..................................................................................................... 68
Chapter Four: Exploring the Urban ............................................................................. 72 Defining the Urban .................................................................................................. 72
Spatial definitions of cities .................................................................................. 74 Evolutionary accounts of cities ............................................................................ 77
A Compact History of Urban Development.. .......................................................... 82 Early cities ........................................................................................................... 83 Industrial cities .................................................................................................... 89 Modem cities ........... , ........................................................................................... 96
The Sustainable City .............................................................................................. 103 The compact city ................................ _ ........................ , ...................................... 108 Sustainable cities and urban sustainability ........................................................ 113
Chapter Five: Grounding the Study - An Introduction to Christchurch .................... 120 Urban form ........................................................................................................ 122 Grounding the research ...................................................................................... 125
New Zealand's Urban Planning History ................................................................ 132 The Resource Management Act (RMA) 1991 ................................................... 135 The Resource Management Act Amendment (2005) ........................................ 142 The Local Government Act ............................................................................... 143
Chapter Six: Results - A Prelude .............................................................................. 147
IV
Multiplicity and Discourse .................................................................................... 147 Inscription Devices ................................................................................................ 148
The interview schedule ...................................................................................... 149 Texts .................................................................................................................. 150 The city .............................................................................................................. 151
Chapter Seven: The Invisible Urban ......................................................................... 152 The Least Sexy ofTenns ....................................................................................... 153 The City as the Antithesis of Nature ..................................................................... 154 Urban Sustainability or Sustainable Cities ............................................................ 158 The Country and the Town: A Natural Relationship? ........................................... 160
Chapter Eight: Multiplicity, Singularity and Defining Urban Sustainability ............ 162 The Slippery Concept of Urban Sustainability ...................................................... 163 The Birds, the Bees and Sustainability .................................................................. 168
Chapter Nine: The Bio-physical Envirorunental Discourse and a Teclmocratic Approach to Urban Sustainability ............................................................................. 169
Urban Sustainability as Technical Process ............................................................ 169 Institutionalising a Technocratic Approach to Urban Sustainability ..................... 173 The Objective City and the Fair City ..................................................................... 176 Misanthropy in the City ......................................................................................... 178 Coercion and Consent ............................................................................................ 179 Saving the Envirorunent by Keeping it Real? ....................................................... 181
Chapter Ten: Sustainabilityas Composite - Untangling the Web ............................ 183 An Holistic Approach ............................................................................................ 183 Building Urban Sustainability: Renovating and Demolishing .............................. 187 Competing Demands and the Tragedy of the Commons ....................................... 190 Risk and Reality: Global Problems and Local Issues ............................................ 194 Sustainability: A Matter of Time? ......................................................................... 197 Social Sustainability .............................................................................................. 199 A Balanced Tripartite? .......................................................................................... 203
Chapter Eleven: Discussion ....................................................................................... 205 Locating the Visible City ....................................................................................... 205
The technocratic discourse and the visible city ................................................. 207 Locating the Invisible City .................................................................................... 209
The built envirorunent and materiality .............................................................. 216 Urban political ecology and economy ............................................................... 217
Bringing the Country to the Town: Nature and the City ....................................... 224 Chapter Twelve: Conclusion ..................................................................................... 228 References ................................................................................................................. 233 Appendix One ............................................................................................................ 262
Legislation ............................................................................................................. 262 Goverrunental Publications .................................................................................... 262 Goverrunental Publications with a Focus on "Sustainability in Urban Areas ......... 266 New Zealand Websites .......................................................................................... 267
v
Table of Figures
Figure 1. New Zealand at the Periphery ........................................................................ 2 Figure 2: Fragile 'Lifeboat' Earth ................................................................................ 43 Figure 3: The City of Angkor ...................................................................................... 85 Figure 4: The Rise of the Grid - Vitruvian Radial Plan ............................................... 86 Figure 5: Florence - The Labyrinthine Medieval City ................................................ 87 Figure 6: San Francisco - The Return of the Grid? ..................................................... 88 Figure 7: Visions of Biodiversity? ............................................................................. 111 Figure 8: Christchurch, New Zealand ........................................................................ 120 Figure 9: The Garden City ......................................................................................... 121 Figure 10: Central Christchurch Framed by the Four Avenues ................................. 123 Figure 11. Distribution of Home Ownership Rates in Christchurch ......................... 124 Figure 12: Business as Usual Map for 2041 .............................................................. 130 Figure 13: Option A Map for 2041 ............................................................................ 130 Figure 14: The Place We Call Home: An Excerpt from the Greater Christchurch
Urban Development Strategy ............................................................................ 172
Vl
Chapter One: Introduction
In 1949, Aldous Huxley published his dystopic Ape and Essence in which he
described the adventures of a small band of New Zealanders who had survived a
cataclysmic nuclear event and then set off to explore the devastated Americas of
2018AD. This portrayal of New Zealand as well-placed to endure many of the world's
perils is not altogether uncommon, nor is it entirely lacking credibility. Shortly before
large-scale European settlement, and after the furore created by the publication of
Darwin's Origin a/Species in 1859, it was suggested that New Zealand be made a
'nature reserve' for the rest ofthe world, and our image of being some kind of special
outdoor park endures (Grove, 1990).
New Zealand is geographically isolated (figure 1), well-endowed with natural
resources, unique in terms of its flora and fauna and our international reputation is
informed by our 'no nukes' policy, outdoor adventure tourism and the
scenery depicted in Peter Jackson's cinematic version of J.R.R Tolkien's Lord a/the
Rings trilogy. Indeed, New Zealand's remote location, lack of hostile neighbours,
generous natural assets and relatively small population of just over four million
people, have all fuelled our reputation as being 'clean and green' and this makes a
significant contribution to our economic prospects with regards to tourism and exports
to sensitive 'eco-friendly' markets.
One might argue that this background accounts for the enthusiastic adoption and
proliferation of the terms' sustainability' and' sustainable development' here', yet
I A list of publications with brief descriptions of their use of these tenus is provided in Appendix One.
1
Figure 1. New Zealand at the Periphery
New Zealand is not alone in its promotion of this concept. As Kates, Parris and
Leiserowitz (2005) have noted, the concept of 'sustainable development' alone
figures on the masthead of Environment magazine, is a feature of over 8,720,000 web
pages, and has been adopted enthusiastically by 'countless' programmes,
organisations, and institutions. Related terms, such as 'sustainable management' and
'sustainable communities, are also nothing if not ubiquitous. Formerly confined to
academic circles, more recently these terms have 'buzzed rapidly into the popular
consciousness trailing clouds of positive affect' (Netting, 1993, in Stone, 2003).
Urban sustainability is an emergent iteration that has evolved out of a growing
awareness that approximately half of the world's population resides in cities and
towns. Whilst this alone provides a compelling case for the addition of an urban
prefix to the term sustainability, calls for achievable local solutions to seemingly
unassailable global problems have also contributed to this term's growing popularity
2
(Blowers, 1997; Welch, 2003; Mercer, 2002). While more focussed definitions of
urban sustainability exist, exemplified in the urban ecological footprint approach
(Rees, 1997a and b; Walker and Rees, 1997) which emphasises bio-physical
environmental elements, many definitions employ a tripartite ofbio-physical
enviromnentae, economic and social concems. 3 Nijkamp and Pen'els' (1994, pA)
version is fairly typical:
Sustainable cities are cities where socio-economic interests are brought together in harmony (co-evolution) with enviromnental and energy concems in order to ensure continuity in change.
Presented thus, it seems an incontrovertibly sound ideal and an appropriate model
upon which we might build our urban areas. As a corollary, there is an ever-increasing
literature devoted to exploring how we might go about pursuing this goal of
sustainability in general, and urban sustainability more specifically. Much of the
existing work on sustainability acknowledges this goal will be complex (but
comprehensible) and difficult (but achievable). The flavour of such literature suggests
that while there may be challenges ahead, we know what we want and we will find a
way of making it happen. It is precisely this supposed singularity of purpose with
which I take issue and my objective here is to re-evaluate the term as it is understood
and applied by urban practitioners.
2 I use the tenn bio-physical environment to isolate tangible biological and built elements from the wider environment which I see as encompassing socio-cultural and economic dimensions as well. My discussion later in this chapter of 'nature' and 'the environment' will illustrate the difficulties involved in separating these from what is 'built' or 'man-made', hence the hyphenation of bio-physical. 3 See, for example, Elkin and McLaren, 1991; Aasen, 1992; Haughton and Hunter, 1994; Harris, 1995; Mitlin and Satterthwaite, 1996; Cameron, 2000; Adger, Brown, Fairbrass, Jordan, Paavola, Rosendo and Seyfang, 2003).
3
The Nature of Things
The orthodox sustainability tripartite includes social, economic and bio-physical
environmental factors, yet it is rare to find a study that attempts to explore the
relationships between these three dimensions. On one hand this is not terribly
surprising; bio-physical environmental aspects of sustainability alone encompass air,
water, land use, transportation, waste and so on, and it is difficult enough to balance
these. On the other hand, it is precisely the assimilation of social, economic and bio
physical environmental factors that sets sustainability apart from other established
movements with a more limited focus, such as social justice or restoration efforts, and
it is curious that the links between the three elements are not subject to more intensive
investigation (though see Ekins (1993) for a now-dated but interesting comparison).
The paucity of scholarship is even more perplexing if it is acknowledged that there are
at least two fundamentally different schools of thought regarding the nature of
'nature' and the nature of 'society' as it is this generally accepted dichotomy that
appears to inform many of problems associated with assimilating these different
strands of sustainability.
A starkly realist ontology recognises 'things' as independent of human interpretation.
These bounded entities sit comfortably within the Enlightenment tradition, and
notions of progress are tied to uncovering predictable patterns and natural laws
governing relationships between different phenomena. Things exist in and as
themselves and they can be seen and measured objectively. Realists insist that the
world is more than mere social convention and ask that anyone who believes
otherwise test their conviction by jumping from the top of a tall building (Sokal, 1996
in Demeritt, 1998). Demeritt (1998, p.176) calls this position' common-sense realism'
4
because one of its chief tenets is that entities, such as the ground we would no doubt
encounter should we choose to jump, are 'pre-existing, independent, and ... objective' .
The counter position - that such realities are constructed - does not deny the
ontological existence of the world, only 'that its apparent reality is never pre-given'
(Demeritt, 1998, p.178). That reality is apparent rather than fixed has its roots in the
interpretavist tradition, a position perhaps best explored in terms of the ideas its
proponents were reacting against. The steady progress in the physical sciences
regarding the 'real' world fascinated early social scientists - including August Comte,
the so-called father of positivism and the first to use the term soci%gie - and much of
the last 200 years of social research has been directed towards uncovering similar
patterns in human behaviour as the physical sciences seemingly found when
predicting atomic or astronomical movements. Society was seen less as the aggregate
of individual behaviour and more as the result ofthose economic, legal, geographic,
religious (and so on) structures that were thought to regulate the social world. This
had consequences for social science research methods. As an example, in his famous
study of suicide, Emile Durkheim was able to form some accurate conclusions about
an intensely personal action without gathering any primary data but relying instead on
statistics and other secondary sources.
An epochal shift occurred, however, when Marxism failed to predict adequately the
supposedly inevitable Revolution and this failure raised questions about the
relationship between these structures that formed the basis of early sociology and
agency. Metatheories that claimed to predict social events in the same way physicists
were able to calculate heat loss or acceleration were increasingly dismissed as
5
inappropriate. Whereas the ability to explain an event had been predicated upon a
mechanical relationship between a human agent and the 'real' world which renders
the sUbjective world obsolete (or at least unworthy of investigation), the
quintessentially human capacity for interpretation and understanding began to come to
the fore. Critics of the 'natural sciences' model advocated paying less attention to
law-like structures that determine human behaviour and more attention to the
meaning-making activities in which people collectively engage. This ushered in a host
of new challenges for the social sciences because, in this paradigm, the researcher
must try to understand the behaviour of sentient beings who are themselves
interpreting and.making sense of the world around them. This has been called the
'double hermeneutic' and it led to a new tum in the social sciences.
There have been many different attempts to reconcile the quest for scientific
prediction with the vagaries of human agency. In an effort to rescue Marxism from its
over-reliance on superstructures Gramsci (1891 - 1937), for example, developed his
notion of hegemony which focused on the role of active, meaning-making agents as
they go about legitimating the various forms of 'rule by consent rather than coercion'
(Castree, 2005, p. 124). Symbolic interactionism4, developed by Herbert Blumer
(1900 - 1987) and refined by scholars such as Becker and McCall (1990), Lofland
and Lofland (1995), Prus (1996), had a specific concern for the ways in which people
act on their intersubjective understanding of the world. Blumer noted:
More and more over the years, as I have had occasion to reflect on what is going on in sociology, the more convinced I have become of the inescapable need of recognising that a human group consists of people who are living. Oddly enough that is not the picture which underlies the dominant imagery in the field of sociology today. Rather, sociology assumes individuals
4 I provide a more detailed account of symbolic interactionism and discourse analysis in Chapter Two.
6
as the products of structures and completely missing the complex ways they organise their behaviour and action to cope with a variety of different situations (Blumer, 1980, cited in Plummer, 1998, p.85).
In Blumer's view, '~~' cannot be treated as mere things but are referred to as
'symbols' in order to highlight the meaning-making enterprises which make each
thing. The specific meanings attached to each thing are made through the ways in
which people actively interact with each other and the object. Language was seen to
playa particularly impOliant role in this interaction because it both produced and
symbolised objects.
Structuralists also saw language as highly significant because it comprised a definite
system which exists independently of individual users; it is thus an exemplar of other
I. (political and economic) structures that likewise constrain and enable individuals
while at the same time allowing for personal expression. According to Swingewood
(2000, p.183) 'structuralism defines reality in terms of the relation between elements,
not in terms of objectively existing things and social facts. Its basic principle is that
the observable is meaningful only in so far as it can be related to an underlying
structure or order'. Whilst this is an interesting point, structuralism has been criticised
for neglecting complex historical processes and contradictions. Post-structuralism,
particularly in the work of Foucault5, was more attentive to these matters.
Truth and reality
Foucault's thought has been the focus of many books and articles, as has the work of
Nietzsche who had a profound influence on Foucault. Though their work is extensive,
5 Foucault denied he was a post-structuralist but is commonly labelled so because of his emphasis on the meaning of a thing as dependent on its relationship with the whole.
------ - --
7
several aspects of their thinking are especially salient to my discussion of people as
interpreters of social situations, and a brief overview illustrates this. One area in
which their work makes a useful contribution to my own project is the way in which
some ideas become truth whilst others become myths or sink into obscurity.
Language, according to Nietzsche, plays a fundamental role in this. Take, for
example, the much-publicised, contemporaneous concern for human rights, justice
and equity. In the minds of many these are noble ideals that inform basic
humanitarian obligations to others. Nietzsche, on the other hand, interprets these
concerns as evidence of the rise, and eventual supremacy, of a 'slave morality'. He
based this assertion on a careful analysis of the German words for 'good' and 'bad'
and argued that these words, as used by the strong, had no moral connotations. The
slaves, on the other hand, saw strength as a vice (evil) and instead presented the
'weak' attributes of humility and charity as 'good'. Similarly, he presents guilt as
lacking any moral overtones, but rather construes this as simply recognition of a debt
with punishment set up as a means of ensuring the debt would be discharged.
'Justice' merely guaranteed the punishment and the debt were equally weighted.
Christian religiosity internalised these so as to modify human aggression and cruelty,
giving rise to the notions of guilt and the soul. Ultimately, Nietzsche's point is that,
[
' All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given
time is a function of power and not truth'. More recently, and far less controversially,
Flyvbjerg (2001) came to similar conclusions based on his study of Aalborg where
rational decision-making regarding the placement of the town's new bus depot, for
example, was the result of post hoc rationalisations constrained by power relations
among different groups rather than a rational decision-making process based on fact
8
and truth. This highlights the utility of developing a sensitivity to power and its
relationship to truth as an important part of my own work.
The second point pertains to the ways in which a particular truth will prevail at a
given time, often because it serves particular interests. A good example of this in the
urban context is the view of the suburb. While the elite occupied the town centres the
suburbs were seen as a grossly inferior place to live, but as mobility increased and the
outskirts became more easily accessible suburbs becam~~~3 in different ways
(Knox, 2005, see also Sherlock, 1991). Truth comes and goes in different historical
contexts but, as Nietzsche pointed out, perhaps we are misguided to try and 'divest
e~nce~I!~richam~igui2" (1887 [1974], p. 335, empha~is in original).6 Rather,
both Nietzsche and Foucault are proponents of the notion that there is not simply one 1
truth out there waiting for us to discover and have set about exploring the PossibilitieJ
associated with this conviction. This is evident in Foucault's methods where he uses \
the term archaeology to describe a process of digging through historical archives to
reveal 'the discursive formations and events that have produced the fields of
knowledge and discursive formations of different historical periods' (Danaher,
Schirato, Webb, 2000, p. ix). Similarly, genealogy refers to the process of 'analysing
and uncovering the historical relationships between truth, knowledge and power'
(Danaher et al. p. xi). An example of a genealogical approach to exposing' counter-
memories' is Jones' (2000) study of Jackie Smith's protest against the United States
Civil Rights Museum, formerly the Lorraine Motel and site of Martin Luther King's
assassination. Whilst ostensibly the Museum celebrates the civil rights movement,
6 Nietzsche continues: That is a dictate of good taste ... the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon. That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do so scientifically in your sense (you really mean mechanistically?) - an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching and nothing more - that is a crudity and naivete, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy.
9
Jackie continues to protest against its insidious suggestion that the battle is actually
over, that it has, in fact, been won already with 'desegregated buses, schools and
lunch counters' (p. 453).
Considerable effort has been directed towards saving truth from Foucault's relativism,
but this has been matched by manifold attempts to explore the implications of his
work. Flyvbjerg (1998,2001), for example, takes issue with the way our emulation of
the natural sciences and the search for singular truth and unifying theory has
compromised our ability to make social science matter, largely because theory
necessarily undervalues context. Flyvbjerg following Dreyfus7 wrote (2001, p. 40):
Insofar as the would-be sciences [social sciences modelled upon the natural sciences] follow the ideal of physical theory, they must predict and explain everyday activities, using decontextualized features. But since the context in which human beings pick out the everyday objects and events whose regularities theory attempts to predict is left out in the decontextualization necessary for theory, what human beings pick out as objects and events need not coincide with those elements over which the theory ranges. Therefore predictions, though often correct, will not be reliable. Indeed, these predictions will work only as long as the elements picked out and related by theory happen to coincide with what the human beings falling under the theory pick out and relate in their everyday activities.
As Flyvbjerg (2001, pA2) explained further, 'while context is central for defining
what counts as an action, context must nevertheless be excluded in a theory in order
for it to be a theory at all' and this presents a very real contradiction with which the
researcher must grapple. Flybjerg addresses this conundrum by positing three kinds of
science - techne, episteme and phronesis - where:
7 Flyvbjerg (2001, p. 22) relates a story whereby Habermas, upon hearing Dreyfus present his model of learning, said to him 'you are talking about skills like hammering and playing chess, but what you really want to do is undermine Western society." Dreyfus replied 'that is exactly what it comes to'.
10
Techne is ... craft and art, and as an activity it is concrete, variable, and context-dependent. Whereas episteme concerns theoretical know why and techne denotes technical know how, phronesis emphasises practical knowledge and practical ethics. Phronesis is often translated as 'prudence' or 'practical common sense'.
What is 'true' is essentially a manifestation of the level at which it is conceptualised
and applied rather than relative and therefore unknowable.
Working in a different tradition, though with a similar eye to the importance of
context, Law's (2004) response to manifold truths is actually enthusiastic. Like
Flyvbjerg, he is keen to expose the political nature of decision-making and
professional practice, however, his focus is very different. At the centre of his work is
the notion of 'multiplicity' which exposes the highly politicised aspects of knowledge
creation. First he critiques singularity that he believes involves a single set of
processes in the world, and which corresponds closely to the realist perspective
outlined above. He then evaluates pluralism where multiple realities are
acknowledged but not believed to interfere with one another. We might find this sort
of pluralism used to explain the worldviews of different cultures; they are' other', and
do not therefore challenge our own thinking even if it is different from our own.
Having exposed these perspectives as inadequate, Law puts forward his preferred
view which he calls multiplicity. He describes this as:
The simultaneous enactment of objects in different practices, when those objects are said to be the same, [h ]ence the claim that there are many realities rather than one. This arises because practices are endlessly variable ... [but] overlap in many and unpredictable ways so that there are always interferences between different realities (2004, p. 162).
i \
As an example of how these realities interact, colliding and bumping into each other,
Law demonstrates how alcoholism is constructed and treated differently in a)
11
textbooks, b) a gastro-enterologist's consultancy room, c) the gastro-enterology ward,
d) at the general practitioner's office and e) at an out-patient clinic. Law proceeds to
outline how enonnous effort goes into making such constructions appear natural,
inevitable and singular largely by making invisible the inscription devices, such as
livers, diagnostic protocols and readmissions, that help construct these
understandings. 8
Law builds on the work of Latour, Woolgar and Mol, among others, to illustrate how
much of what we take as real is rather the result of substantial, detennined effort to
create a singular reality via the creation and maintenance of a vast hinterland of 'more
or less routinised and costly literary and material relations that include statements
about reality and the realities themselves [and various] inscription devices' (2004, p.
160). As support, Law draws upon Latour and Woolgar's laboratory ethnography (or
'praxiography' to use Mol's tenn which highlights the ways in which methods
produce rather than expose reality), which details how the knowledge produced in this
setting was the result of the methods and inscription devices used, such as desks,
books, rats and bioassays. In this particular case, Latour and Woolgar demonstrated
that without the bioassay, this knowledge, this substance, could not be said to exist.
The existence of this knowledge is constructed by both people and the 'network of
elements that make up the inscription device' (Law, 2004, p. 21). Demeritt (1998) has
used similar reasoning to explain forest conservation and global wanning. Methods,
in this view, are perfonnative and different method assemblages and devices would
have possibly, even necessarily, produced a different, but no less 'true' construction.
8 It is interesting to note a tension here between a science that adheres to a 'one world' view and one that now uses tenus such as 'fuzzy logic', 'chaos' theory, and 'loosely coupled systems'.
12
Law uses other examples from the medical and legal professions to outline his
concern that we tend to direct much of our energy towards creating a singular truth
about the world when it is more a mess of multiple realities. He noted (p. 141):
... if we are able and willing to tolerate the uncertainties and the specificities of enactment, flux and resonance, then we find we are confronted with a quite different set of important puzzles about the nature of the real and how to intervene in it. Perhaps, for instance, the' great structures' of inequality are to be understood not as great structures but as relatively noncoherent enactments which nevertheless resonate or interfere with one another to keep each other in place.
Certainly, to reduce 'structure' - one of the central ideas of sociology - to a 'non-
coherent enactment' is something of a challenge and has enonnous consequences for
the discipline and its critical capacity.
Law's metaphysics challenges the dominant Buro-American view that reality is
independent and prior to the observer, that it is definite in shape and fonn, that it is
singular and constant, that the objects it discovers are passive, and that what is
'absent' is universally so (2004, p.145). The last point is an interesting one as it
provides a practical tool for conducting research, that is, to pay attention to what is
not said or done, because what is absent also helps frame the world; it is just that
much harder to see.9 Law also advocates an expansion of the traditional understanding
of methods to one which explicitly acknowledges the research hinterland and
inscription devices such as visual depictions, maps, bodies, demonstrations,
conversations, ceremonies and, importantly, allegories where what is not said or is left
un-done comes to the fore.
9 Merrifield (2000, p. 132) also asks us to attend to 'unobservable presences' in his development of a messy 'street Marxism' more attenuated to everyday life.
13
This latest work from Law builds on earlier developments around Actor Network
Theory (ANT) which challenges more widely accepted views on the character of
agency. Actor Network Theory employs assemblages of human and non-human
actants (actors/agents) whose agency depends not only on its inherent properties but
also on its relationship with others in the network (Law, 1992; Murdoch, 1999; Law
and Hassard, 1999). In this way, both human and non-human phenomena co-
constitute one another. This has led to a dramatic expansion ofthe material considered
suitable for social scientific investigation, with subject matter that has formerly been
confined to the natural sciences, particularly biology and ecology, now forming an
important part of social scientists' investigations.
The political ecology of nature
A non-human entity that takes a central role in my study is that of nature. A typical
view of nature is that which is untouched or unmodified by human activity or
intervention, yet this discussion of the ways in which social realities are generated,
and how scientific truths are contextually contingent, should alert us to the possibility
that nature is similarly constructed. 10 In the context of this work, nature is not
something to be understood as separate to society but as co-constitutive of it. Within
the frame of Actor Network Theory, nature is an actant in a relational assemblage,
without which we cannot define or understand ourselves (see also Haraway, 1985,
1991; Downey and Dumit, 1997; Murdoch, 1999; Philo and Wilbert, 2000;
Whatmore, 1999,2002). This is evident in the commonly occurring definition of
10 Lynn White's publication of the Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis in 1967 is an important piece of work in which he attributes the division of nature and society to the Christian tradition. As an aside, it is also interesting to note his conclusion that this separation has resulted in an 'ecologic crisis' predates more recent concerns of political ecologists by almost 40 years.
14
nature as that which is untouched by people; we can only understand what is natural
in tenns of ourselves.
Edward Said's (1978) Orientalism stands out as a seminal text in the development of
this theoretical tradition which recognises that self-definition relies on the existence of
the Other. Specifically, his conclusion that our view of the oriental Other gives us
definition has been modified by academics whose work on cyborgs and hybridity
challenges orthodoxies around what it means to human/non-human. Gandy (2005), for
example, invokes the idea of the cyborg to counter many taken-for-granted dualisms,
including that of nature and culture. In favour of what might be called a 'relational'
approach (Castree, 2004, p. 191), Gandy (2005) explains that the cyborg can be
understood as 'a cybernetic construction, a hybrid of machine and organism' and
therefore 'urban infrastructures can be conceptualised as a series of inter-connecting
life support systems' where the home, for example, is conceived as a kind of
'exoskeleton' (2005, p. 28). Marvin and Medd (2006, p. 322) provided another
example of such work during their investigation into the metabolism of 'obecity' and
fat in order to better understand 'the defining relations between bodies, cities and
sewers' and their interdependencies. Such thinking is presented as supplementary to
that neo-organicist approach which sees urban areas as relatively simplistic functional
analogies of the human body or the eco-city where the city is a complex organism.
Instead, the focus is on the virtual and actual body-city nexus comprising networks
and neurons that 'sustain the relationship between the body and the city' (Gandy,
2005, p. 27). Gandy recognizes these virtual spaces as generative rather than merely
reflective of existing social realities but warns against overlooking particular
'combinations of fixed capital and human expertise that enable specific nodes ... to
15
play enhanced roles in the arena of cultural and economic production' (p. 28) and that
'urban infrastructures are not lonely material manifestations of political power ... they
are also systems of representation that lend urban space its cultural meaning' (p. 37).
The works ofWolch (1998), Whatmore (2002), Philo and Wilbelt (2000), Melson
(2001) and Cloke and Perkins (2005) also challenge traditional readings of nature.
This literature, placed alongside that of others who argue that nature is a contested
term (see for example Escobar, 1996; Demeritt, 1998; Macnagten and Urry, 1998;
Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2000; Cas tree 2000,2004,2005; Castree and Braun, 2001;
Desfor and Keil, 2004; Foladori, 2005) has led to the development of what is often
referred to as political ecology. Wainright (2005, pp. 1037-1038) argues that political
ecology should aim to 'take apart those practices that stabilise the singular worldhood
ofthe modem world' because it renders many important voices silent. As an exemplar
ofthis approach, he cites Raffles' (2002) In Amazonia which stands 'open to the
multiplicity and unboundedness' of the place by 'bring[ing] people, places, and the
non-human into 'our space' ofthe present' (Raffles, 2002, in Wainright, 2005, p.
1040). This thinking aligns closely with Hinchcliffe, Keames, Degen and Whatmore's
'ecologised politics' (2005, p. 655) which turns away from representation toward
enabling ecology to speak to us in different ways.
Urban political ecologists and economists have likewise adopted reformulated
understandings of nature/society to explain inequity and uneven distribution of
environmental goods and externalities in cities (Martinez-Alier, 2001; Swyngedouw,
1997,2004; Heynen, 2006). Likewise, Desfor and Keil (2004) have adapted
Lefebvre's (1991) political economy based on a triad of spatial practices,
16
representations of space and representational spaces, to develop a new ontology 'that
has moved beyond the antagonism of urbanism and nature'. Similarly, Swyngedouw
and Kaika (2000, p. 569) argue that in the city' society and nature, representation and
being, are inseparable, integral to each other, infinitely bound up' and that following
the flows between them demands a new approach. Swyngedouw and Kaika (2000)
and Desfor and Keil (2004) call this approach urban ecology, which, following
Heynen (2006, p. 500), should be distinguished from the 'classic urban ecology' of
the Chicago School that emphasised physical characteristics and was therefore
extremely reductionist. ll The new urban ecology, according to Desfor and Keil, 'goes
beyond articulations proposed by growth advocates and anti growth activists who
pursue their social and economic projects by using nature in different ways' (2004, p.
71). It recognises the co-constitutive nature of nature and its political role in urban
life.
Duncan and Duncan (2004) illustrate these points very well in their case study of
Bedford Village (NY). In this work they build on more established themes of zoning
and legislation as instruments of social control and call upon a 'seemingly innocent
appreciation oflandscape' as a further mechanism of exclusion and class segregation.
Particular practices around the aestheticisation of landscape can be as effective as any
physical barrier (2004, p. 4). Likewise, Knox (2005) provided an interesting
application of the way in which particular politicised articulations of nature (in this
case that of the frontier myth and arcadian Utopia) have informed current North
American suburban practice. Here he posits suburbanisation and its 'enchantment' as
necessary for the sustained consumption and capital accumulation of political-
II I would add a further distinction between this emergent brand of highly theoretical urban ecology and that developed by Richard Register in the 1970s which was very action-oriented and centred on a singular conception of 'nature' .
17
economic development. He illustrates how the modem metropolis has undergone a
transformation from being the manifestation of the political economy of
manufacturing to that of consumption. Modernity, characterised by 'individualism,
rationality, large-scale social integration, and the idea of progress' has seen the
suburbs recast successively as 'intellectual utopias to bourgeois utopias to
degenerative utopias to conservative utopias, each with a distinctive physical form
and moral landscape' (2005, p. 34). Their latest incarnation he labels 'Vulgaria',
alluding to the 'starter castles', SUVs that make up compulsory 'driveway
accessories' and 'gruesome affectations of spelling' that characterise the newer
suburbs. Vulgaria serves to naturalise social and cultural power inherent in political
economic structures - currently 'competitive consumption, moral minimalism, and
disengagement from notions of social justice and civil society' - and makes this order
appear inevitable.
Dwelling with nature
Such studies are consistent with a growing body of scholarship which sees a re
evaluation of our relationship with nature and its political character as central to a
better understanding ofbio-physical environmental and social concerns (Beck, 1995;
Macnaghten and Urry, 1998; Foladori, 2005; Harvey, 1996; Castree and Braun,
2001). Heidegger's concept of dwelling has also been influential here and literature in
this tradition usually invokes his idea of the 'phenomenology of place'. Like
Lefebvre's (1974) conceptual triad of spatial practices, representations of space and
representational spaces, Heidegger is concerned to show how different conceptions of
space and place have meaningful consequences for the ways in which we understand
and relate to the world. 'Being-in-the-world' describes the everyday relationships
18
people have with their worlds. This, in tum, has three components including 'being
in' which involves concern (or lack of) marked by 'ties of work, affection,
responsibility, interest and memory' (Relph, 1985, p. 17). Then there is the entity
which is the self, and finally, 'in-the-world' which is so obvious that we have trouble
even detecting it under most circumstances. 12 According to Heidegger the world has
two forms; 'presence at hand', which manifests as a result of disinterested reflection
or causal curiosity, and 'readiness to hand' which is the consequence of 'making,
attending to something and looking after it' (Relph, 1985, p. 18). As for the
relationship between the two, as Relph (1985, p. 26) noted 'The remoteness or
closeness of what is ready-to-hand need not correspond with objective distances of
things present-at-hand. The house next door is a few meters away, yet it is utterly
remote because my neighbour is unfriendly'. The idea of dwelling acknowledges such
consequences oflived-in-ness and emphasises that we can only access the world
through this process of inhabiting and embodying (Jager, 1985).
Seamon (1993, p. 1) claimed that phenomenology acknowledges the importance of
both 'dwelling' and 'objectivity' and therefore gives us 'an important intellectual
means for healing the rift between art and science, seeing and understanding,
knowledge and action, and design and building' because the Western intellect has
become dominated by 'economic, technological or aesthetic concerns alone and do
not always relate to the full range of human experience, particularly a sense of place
and dwelling' (Seamon, 1993, p.2). Cartesian and Kantian dichotomies such as
person-world, body-mind, theory-practice and nature-culture have fractured our
12 It is like trying to teach a fish to see water. ..
19
human experience ofthe world and left the bio-physical environment vulnerable to
over-exploitation. Science and technology exacerbate this process because any
seemingly objective view is constrained and bounded by our practice or our
'concemful dealings' (Fotlz, 1995, p. 11). Foltz explains:
The south wind for example, is discovered by the fanner not as a flow of air in a particular direction that merely happens to be present but as a sign of rain; it is not initially manifest as a bare fact to which he subsequently assigns a value, but as something inherently bound up with his work.
Weare thus too accustomed to seeing nature as a stock or standing reserve when what
we need, according to Heidegger, is a 'newly experienced naturalness of nature' (in
Foltz, 1995, p. 13) which would fonn the basis of a new environmental ethic.
Hegemonic nature and the environment
For some, particularly those who hold to a realist ontology, this emergent view of a
highly politicised, constructed nature has led to a sometimes defensive attitude.
Eagleton (2000, p. 83), for example, has observed that 'nature is a word which
nowadays must be compulsively draped in scare quotes' but this deeper analysis of
the implications of constructing nature suggests that there is more to fear than mere
ontological nit-picking. Demeritt (1996), for example, has pointed out that 'The
debate about social constructivism is also about power and legitimacy' . An
acknowledgement that our view of nature is constructed rather than given therefore
raises questions about whose interests are served by particular constructions and how
these constructions are generated.
20
The prevalence of' good guy - bad guy' literature and film, such as the Star Wars
series and Lord of the Rings trilogy, generates a sense of power as wielded and, in the
interests of a good story, successfully resisted. Such tales do little to expose the
ambiguities of power or its more subtle manifestations, yet rarely does the world
appear to operate in this way. The concept of hegemony is therefore a useful tool to
explore the intricacies of power.
The concept of hegemony represents Gramsci's attempt to preserve the credibility of
Marxism given that the predicted Revolution was confined to particular places despite
widespread class disparities and inequality. Why was it that an entire class failed to
act in what was said to be their best interest? And why do citizens actually assent to
curtailment of their freedoms, even when it has a negative impact on their lives?
According to Gramsci, people behave in such a way because, as agents, they are
actively and continually legitimising new forms of rule. Hegemony, in this
interpretation, is a process whereby the dominant factions of a society legitimise their
interests by making them appear good for society in general, and ultimately portray
these ideas as basic common sense or 'reciprocally confirming' in practice (Williams,
1977, in Castree, 2005, p. 19). No one class ever completely dominates from above
but has to constantly assume a balance 'between persuasion and coercion, active
consent and force' (Swingewood, 2000, p. 119) and hegemony is therefore 'made' at
micro- and macro- levels in a process of establishing new values (p. 123; see also
Jessop, 1997).
As an illustration of hegemony in action Castree (2005, pp. 19-20) discusses the
concept of nature as an expression of' an all-pervasive aspect of our collective
21
thought and practice'. While we may take nature at face value it is an idea that 'has a
history, a geography and a sociology ... [ which] reflects ... the agenda of those who
promulgate these ideas'. As an example, Castree invokes Takac' s (1996) view of
'biodiversity', which he claims is a recent invention that now organises how the world
is seen, and where biodiversity is good and a lack of biodiversity is bad. Importantly,
this reflects the values of biodiversity advocates rather than biodiversity.
Counter-hegemonic positions present a challenge to the dominant view by attempting
to establish their own fonns of legitimacy. In tenns of what is natural, for example,
counter-hegemonic positions that have since become sites of resistance include ideas
around homosexuality as 'unnatural' or people of colour as 'naturally less intelligent'
than Caucasians (Castree, 2005). This last 'truth' has been used to justify slavery,
land-grabs, sterilisation programmes and assimilation policies that, at the time,
appeared to be simple common sense. It is this attribute that makes for one of the
most convincing expressions of power, a point Baragwanath (2003) and Baragwanath,
McAloon and Perkins (2003) emphasised in their investigation of the discourse of
globalisation which privileges the novel, the external and the global over the local, the
specific and the conditional. They hold such power because, as Rescher (2005, pp. 29
- 30) noted, common sense facts seem 'transparently true, ... obvious and ... self
evident and [their] denial would be deemed not just false but absurd and wildly
eccentric'. Thus when ideas attain this status they are extremely difficult to challenge
as the ideas have become self-regulating and there is no need for them to be enforced
or imposed from the top down.
22
Castree's (2005) discussion ofneo-Malthusian thought serves as another useful
illustration of the power of common sense, and the ways in which it can serve
particular interests. Malthus (1798) argued that while increases in resources are
aritlunetic, population growth is geometric, hence population will eventually and
inevitably outstrip supply. This line of thought was adopted in The Limits to Growth
(Meadows and Meadows, 1972) and Lifeboat Ethics where Hardin (1974) argued that:
We should go lightly in encouraging the rising expectations among the poor. .. for if everyone in the world had the same standard ofliving as we do, we would increase pollution by a factor of20. Therefore it is questionable morality to increase food supply. We should hesitate to make sacrifices locally for the betterment of the rest of the world.
Yet Harvey (1974) claimed the neo-Mathusianism that led to this kind of thought
should be considered an ideology because, following Marx, such ideas are always
those of the ruling classes, and Hardin's comment clearly reveals where his interests
lie. Harvey's own position was not that a Malthusian view is inherently illogical but
that it rests on certain assumptions about nature that appear to be common sense and
incontestable but are actually more controversial. 'Subsistence levels', for example,
are historically and culturally relative, as is the concept of 'natural resources'.
Furthermore, he argued that scarcity is more the result of power relations and the
tendency for capitalism to generate wealth for the few and poverty for the many.
What appeared to be logical and common sense was in essence a justification for the
West's reluctance to redistribute wealth in more equitable ways (Castree, 2005).
Science and Sensibility
Science, technology, rational calculation and quantification are important components
in the process of establishing hegemony via the legitimisation of certain ideas such as
23
bio-physical environmental limits, sustainabilityand sustainable development. A good
deal of credibility rests on the way science portrays itself as apolitical, value-free and
objective. In celebrating these characteristics, science presents a convincing case that
these are the terms upon which decision-making should be made. Robert Merton
(1973 [1942]) has been a key proponent of this view of science and Law (2004, p. 16)
refers to him as the inventor of the sociology of science. His portrayal of 'real'
science - free from the influence of politics, ideology and economic interests - would
enable scientists to 'pursue [their] task of discovering the truth about the natural
world' (Fitzgerald and Dew, 2004, p. 10). That science does this is one of the more
fundamental truths of our age.
There are, of course, what we might call counter-hegemonic views of science.
Fitzgerald and Dew (2004, p. 11) in their collection of challenges to science in New
Zealand note that 'The image of the scientist as someone independently choosing their
own research problems and plugging away in their own laboratory is largely a
romanticised one from an imagined past'. That those with a vested interest in the
outcomes often fund scientists' work is not the only point in an increasingly diverse
critique of science, its objectivity and its methods; and I have already discussed Law's
(2004) After Method and Flyvbjerg's (1998) Rationality and Power.
Levidow's (1986) collection, Science as Politics, adopts a similar perspective and
highlights the contested nature of scientific discovery. From human geography,
Gregory (2004) presents the complex genealogy of the 'war on terror' and shows how
much of the scientific evidence used to justify both this war and other foreign policy
has been manufactured in the interests of a 'colonial' present and future. Livingstone
(2005) argues that the interpretation and application of scientific theory is shaped
24
heavily by local cultural politics. Mulkay and Gilbert's (1991) 'sociological
pilgrimage' provides a good illustration of how scientists construct their social worlds
through discourse as does Potter and Wetherall's (1994) analysis ofthe representation
of scientific facts in the television programme Cancer, Your Money or Your Life.
Though there are many who might argue that there are numerous benefits to be had
from the way the natural and physical sciences 'shape our vision ofthe world' (Davis,
1997) others believe the supposed objectivity of these sciences to more damaging.
Owens (2005, p. 289), for example, has argued that 'subtly, [policy] outcomes may be
predetennined by ostensibly neutral techniques of ['scientific'] appraisal, so that
political and ethical choices masquerade as technical ones'. This separation of ethics
and technology signals the ambivalent role of science in today's world, a predicament
that Beck has highlighted in Risk Society (1992). While science and technology have
indeed brought us many benefits, they have also altered the fonn and likelihood of
human-generated hazards such as nuclear disaster (Chernobyl, Ukraine), chemical
spills (Bhopal, India and the Rhine, Gennany), oil spills (Valdez, Alaska), ozone
depletion and global wanning. I will suspend my discussion of the implications of
Beck's work until later, and now tum to a debate surrounding the ways in which the
ambivalence of science and the nature of nature become apparent in everyday life.
Everyday Life as Location and Process
Practical common sense, or 'phronesis' to use Flyvbjerg's (2001) tenn, has, in
contrast to episteme and techne, an irrefutably everyday air about it. With some
notable exceptions (see, for example, Macnaghten, 2003) a scholarly concern with
everyday life is relatively recent in Anglo-American social science, it having been
25
neglected in the search for those structures that infonn our everyday lives. The
French, however, have long been interested in the quotidian and its connections to
anything from ways of walking (Bourdieu, 1986) to urban fonn (Lefebvre, 1991). De
Certeau's The Practice of EvelY day Life (1984) was instrumental in asserting the
importance of everyday activities, such as reading, talking, cooking, dwelling, as
active in the construction of social reality. Bourdieu (1986, 1998) was also concerned
to highlight the connections between the most mundane actions, such as blowing
one's nose, to wider social structures involving the division of labour, domination and
so on. Central to his theorisation is the way in which practical knowledge is a
'genuinely constitutive power' which can then be used to reconcile objective reality
on one hand and its representations on the other. 13
The role of everyday life also assumes extra significance in the works of Henri
Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974, translated 1991) where he provided a
theoretical framework within which to explore the relationship between legislation
and policy, spatial manifestations and everyday life. Lefebvre was particularly
concerned to achieve two things. First, he wanted to show how space is actively
produced using a 'conceptual triad' involving spatial practices, representations of
space and representational spaces. Representations of space are conceptualisations of
space as constructed by planners, architects and developers with their attendant belief
systems. Representational space is directly lived and it 'overlays physical space
making symbolic use of its objects' (Lefebvre, 1991, p.39) and, as Merrifield
suggested, in representational space 'there's more there there' (2000b, p.174). Spatial
practices give everyday, social and urban realities structure and include patterns of
13 Thrift's non-representational theory also takes issue with a distanced view of the world.
26
interaction and other networks. It is spatial practice that keeps representational space
and representations of space both together and apart (Merrifield, 2000b, p.175).
Second, Lefebvre was concerned to bring about a 'rapprochement between physical
space (nature), mental space (formal abstractions about space), and social space (the
space of human action, and conflict and 'sensory phenomena')' (Merrifield, 2000b,
p.171) which he thought had been separated in the interests of capital. This triad
challenged traditional dualisms where, for example, space was seen as an 'objective
physical surface with specific fixed characteristics upon which social categories were
mapped out' (Valentine, 2001, pA). Space, such an important component of everyday
life, is now seen as playing an 'active role in the constitution and reproduction of
social identities, and social identities and relations are recognised as producing
material and symbolic or metaphorical spaces' in the same way that inscription
devices and method assemblages (Law, 2004) create knowledge or generate particular
interpretations.
In this view, space and society not only interact, they are mutually constitutive and
become manifest in daily life. This perspective can be related to recent debates about
the imagined geographies of places and the ways in which such geographies underpin
people's interpretations of environmental and social change. The use ofthe term
'imagined geographies' here recognises the co-constitutive nature of space, that is, the
blend of 'real', 'subjective' and 'inter-subjective' spaces. That these three 'spaces' are
linked emphasises the point that changes in one space will inevitably echo in another
and the value of Lefebvre's thesis is the acknowledgment of the intimate connection
between abstract, planned spaces, daily life and these imagined geographies. An
27
example of this is the ways in which cities now try to brand themselves in order to
participate in the global competition for skilled migrants and foreign investment. This
branding imperative is having a profound effect on the ways in which our cities are
constructed not just physically but mentally as well. This idea has been a feature of
Eade and Mele's (2002, p. 6) discussion of developments in urban theory. They note
that urban imagery should be seen as a 'constitutive element in the social production
of the city [where] the built fonn of the city and the interpretative schemas of
different social groups are in active engagement. .. The imaginary ... acts and is acted
upon through the production of the city'. Concepts such as 'urban sustainability' also
playa key role in the generation of these imaginaries, albeit in often unforeseen ways.
The ways in which this idea moulds the construction of the city, both mentally and
physically, is a central task of my own investigation as are the ways in which these
constructions are made, and the reasons why they are made in particular ways.
Thesis Overview .
While I will present a more detailed account of urban sustainability in the following
pages, this chapter has introduced the various concepts associated with the tenn
within a broad theoretical arena of the production and construction of meaning. I have
explored some of the key themes and ideas underpinning my study; foremost among
these is the incongruity of the popularity oftenns like urban sustainability given the
contested nature of the realities they seem to present. As outlined earlier the more
orthodox urban sustainability tripartite - the schema that sets it apart as a movement,
a goal or a way of being - tries to combine social, economic and bio-physical
environmental factors. Yet, as I have shown in this chapter social and even bio
physical environmental 'realities' should not necessarily be taken at face value. This
28
is a feature ofthe emergent field of urban political ecology which posits particular
views of nature and society as central to issues like urban sustainability.
This position has consequences for what can be considered an appropriate
methodology, and this is discussed in Chapter Two. Chapter Three outlines my
reading of the evolution of the concepts of sustainability, sustainable development and
sustainable management, and Chapter Four is devoted to an exploration of the urban
as this is a concept that too often suffers neglect, confusion and reductionism. Chapter
Five presents some background infOlmation on the case study area and this
necessarily involves an investigation of developments at the national and international
levels as these inform - but do not dictate - local events. In Chapter Six I discuss the
methods used in my investigation in more detail. In Chapters Seven through to Ten I
present the results of my research based on in-depth interviews with 35 urban
practitioners. These results are discussed and evaluated in Chapter Eleven. Chapter
Twelve offers some conclusions based on existing literature and my own results.
29
Chapter Two: Methodology
Urban sustainability is an increasingly ubiquitous tenn, and its all too frequent
invocation makes it appear a singular, fairly straightforward idea, if somewhat
difficult to achieve in practice. Yet as I outlined in the previous chapter, if nothing
else, the multiplicity of truth and the contested character of the seemingly simple
tenns 'nature' and 'society' should make us wary of accepting the tenn at face value.
My objective is therefore to dig beneath the usual unreflective use of the tenn and
explore how urban practitioners understand and apply the concept, with what
consequences. I am not seeking to uncover some 'true' meaning of the tenn, to
discover barriers to sustainability or develop yet another set of indicators, but to
investigate the multiplicity surrounding its use.
Ifhumans make meaning and their realities (rather than simply responding to a
singular objective, predetennined reality), the appropriate explanations ofthat reality
must result from an understanding of the meaning-making of social actors rather than
an assessment of external structures (Swingewood, 2000, see also Jaworski and
Coupland, 1999). With the objective of exploring my participants' understanding of
urban sustain ability in the context of their everyday professional practice heavily
structured quantitative methods were unsuitable as, in the first instance, it would have
involved imposing my own understanding on the interviewees via the survey
instrument. A structured quantitative approach would, in the second instance,
foreclose the possibility of exploring alternative views and 'the sheer density of
feeling .. , and complex relationships between ideas of nature and wider critiques of
progress and societal change' (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998, p.77). My own study
required methods that allowed me to observe various settings and the participants,
30
gain in-depth or 'rich' infonnation from certain key infonnants and combine this with
an evaluation of other texts and observations. Thus my research was situated within
what we might loosely call naturalistic tradition because much of the social
phenomena I witnessed happened in their natural settings rather than in a simulated
environment like the laboratory or via some secondary mechanism such as a postal
survey. Naturalism can be seen as an attempt to gain an understanding of social life as
the participants see it (Babbie, 2001, p.283), or as an 'examination of the contexts in
which meaning and behaviour arise' (Perkins, 1989, p.74). This requires some
understanding of how people make sense of the everyday world (Babbie, 2001) or, as
Ley (1988, p.121) put it, the researcher must try to 'make sense of their making sense
of the events and opportunities confronting them in everyday life'.
More specifically, I adopted the techniques associated with critical discourse analysis
and symbolic interactionism. The tenn 'exploration' is often used to describe that
process whereby the researcher engages with multiple lines of enquiry (Blumer, 1969;
Lofland and Lofland, 1995; Perkins, 1988, 1989; Baragwanath, 2003) which will
yield numerous, sometimes disparate or even contradictory data. Both observations
and interviews allow the researcher to 'collect the richest possible data, achieve an
intimate familiarity with the setting, and engage in face-to-face interaction so as to
participate in the minds of the settings' participants' (Lofland and Lofland, 1995,
p.17).
'Inspection' involved analysing and categorising the various data along thematic
lines. Whilst my initial attempts lacked the subtleties oflater versions they can be
31
seen as attempts to evaluate each piece of data for its significance, highlight or resolve
contradictions and flag new lines of enquiry. As time went by an increasingly
important part of my study involved paying attention more specifically to what was
not there, though this was more difficult to achieve (see Foucault 1972 and Law,
2004). Though it was complicated somewhat by this absence of data, my study was
generally consistent with a qualitative research process typified as highly
interpretative, responsive and reflexive, where data gathering and analysis take place
concurrently.
Symbolic Interactionism
As outlined in the previous chapter, symbolic interaction is a response to a need for
methodological tools with which we might investigate the intersubjective nature of
human experience and activity. It does not invoke meta-level structural explanations
of human behaviour, nor does it rely on micro-level accounts of individuals in
isolation as they go about daily life. Instead, the focus is on intersubjective, or shared
experience and behaviour. From this perspective, understanding social situations
means 'understanding the capacity of actors to actively create their social situations
and to learn from them' (Bounds, 2004, p. 27). Becker and McCall (1990, pp. 3-4)
elaborate on this in the following way:
Any human event can be understood as the result of the people involved ... continually adjusting what they do in light of what others do, so that each individual's line of action 'fits' into what others do. That can only happen if human beings typically act in nonautomatic fashion, and instead construct a line of action by taking account of the meaning of what others do in response to their earlier actions. Human beings can only act in this way if they can incorporate the responses of others into their own act and thus anticipate what will probably happen ... (This emphasis on the way people construct the meaning of others' acts is where
32
the 'symbolic' in 'symbolic interaction' comes from). If everyone can and does do that, complex joint acts can occur (Adapted from Becker, 1988, p. 18).
Importantly, it is this reflexivity that forms the means by which structures change
over time; an idea which has been developed by Bourdieu (1998) and Giddens (1984).
The symbolic interactionist's enterprise is empirical, and often involves detailed
ethnographies that include participant observation. Becker and McCall (1990, p.5)
insist that the researcher should answer their research questions by going out into the
world to 'see for themselves' and then generate a theoretical position in line with their
observations. Prus (1996) adopted a similar view, suggesting observation, participant
observation and interviews be used for data collection. Observation, he noted,
includes not only 'those things that one witnesses through one's visual and auditory
senses' but also 'documents, diaries, records, frequency counts, maps and the
like'(1990, p. 19).14 Participant observation, on the other hand, turns what has been
considered a weakness of qualitative research - the so-called biased or subjective
elements - into a strength. As a participant, one's experiences can provide a real
insight into particular life-worlds and may enable the researcher to 'access the
experiences of others in these settings in much more meaningful fashion' (Prus, 1996,
p. 19). Interviews using many open-ended questions form the third method of data
collection as they provide an opportunity for the researcher to 'uncover, ascertain and
qualify meanings that others hold for objects in their life-worlds and the ways in
which people go about accomplishing their activities in practice' (Prus, 1996, pp 20-
21). This inclusion ofthe both observation of documents and texts, and interviews in
14 Some of these that proved useful for my own investigation included documents associated with the Christchurch Southwest Area Plan, the Greater Christchurch Urban Design Strategy and the Draft Long-Term Council Community Plan. These are discussed in more detail in Chapter Five.
33
as legitimate methods of data collection is consistent with other approaches that focus
on the linguistic elements of social life, such as critical discourse analysis.
Critical Discourse Analysis
There can be little doubt that there is a great deal of talk about sustainability. It is a
central tenet of the social sciences that social processes and entities, such as language,
are constitutive in that they both reflect and help construct the social world. This
construction is mediated by existing institutions and other more or less coherent
'enactments' (Law, 2004), hence the naturalistic research methods attempts to capture
the flow of meaning-making as it is both produced and reproduced. Language, in
spoken and written form, comprises one social process with which we may engage,
evaluate and analyse in order to fonn conclusions about the way people understand
their world. Discourse analysis is often used to explore these processes.
As Baragwanath (2003, p. 13) writes, 'Discourse is a useful concept, but it is
notoriously nebulous'. The difficulty of defining discourse can be attributed in part to
the way it varies in different contexts among different authors. Discourse is therefore
many things to many people. Dryzek's (1997, p.8) application of discourse is
interesting in terms of my own work because of his focus on environmental
discourses. He defines discourse as 'a shared way of apprehending the world.
Embedded in language, it enables those who subscribe to it to interpret bits of
information and put them together into coherent stories'. Dryzek sees discourse as
comprising 'basic entities' whose existence is explicitly recognised. As an example,
some discourses acknowledge ecosystems as being 'real' whilst others do not.
According to Dryzek, discourses also include assumptions about what natural
34
relationships might be, such as competition rather than cooperation or the existence of
hierarchies. Agents and metaphors, such as the global commons or God comprise
other elements of a discourse (1997, p. 16).
Fairclough (1992, 1995,2003) is more explicit about the constitutive role of
discourse. He wrote:
Discourses are ways of representing the world - the processes, relations and structures ofthe material world, the 'mental world' of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and so forth, and the social world. Particular aspects ofthe world may be presented differently, so we are generally in the position of having to consider the relationship between different discourses ... Discourses not only represent the world as it is (or ... as it is seen to be), they are also projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world, and tied into projects which change the world in particular directions (2003, p. 69).
Thus, rather than simply identifying and categorising various discourses, we should
also attend to the constitutive and performative qualities of discourses and the ways in
which they change the world, including its material fonn, its architecture and urban
design. While some discourse analysts limit their investigation to grammatical
constructs, such as nominalisation, Fairclough is more interested in the 'systems of
rules which make it possible for certain statements but not others to occur at particular
times, places and institutional locations' (Fairclough, 1992, p. 40, my emphasis).
What is it that constrains some kinds of talk while other fonns flourish? How are
some fonns of knowledge legitimised and then naturalised in the built environment
whilst other ways of knowing are discredited and dismissed? Asking these kinds of
questions encourages the researcher to go beyond superficial readings of texts and
look for those systems of rules that promote certain discourses while making others
35
difficult if not impossible, though this must necessarily also take into account actual
texts and more detailed mechanisms of change.
Balancing systems of rules with more detailed mechanisms requires a multiple
approach to discourse analysis. Baragwanath (2003), in following Fairclough, thus
identified three levels at which we might conduct our investigations based on texts,
interaction and social context which correspond to micro-, meso- and macro- levels
explanations. The ideological content of texts, exposed in assumptions and metaphors,
can be examined at the micro-level through an 'analysis of its words and sentences'
(Baragwanath, 2003, p. 15). It is important to keep in mind that what was meant to be
said is less important than 'looking at what position the subject must have been in for
them to be the subject of such utterances' (Fairclough, 1992, p. 53).
To make such an assessment of this requires attention to the context in which
statements are made. Scollon and Scollon (2003) provide a good argument for being
attentive to such matters: a 'No nude bathing' bathing sign ostensibly means the same
thing in the back of the truck going to the beach as it does displayed at the beach, but
it has a different effect in each case. Baragwanath (2003) takes such examples as
implying a need for meso-level, 'interdiscursive' analysis where discourses can be
understood as representing the world or a part of it where analysis goes beyond
grammar to get at 'shared' imaginaries. These shared imaginaries are similar to
Griggs and Howarth's 'policy frames' (2002) which form a framework within which a
hierarchy of norms and codes exists. This hierarchy then guides behaviour and
decision-making in policy formation. The degree to which these understandings are
shared forms the basis of Fairclough's (2003) distinction between 'little d' discourses
36
which are more particular to space and time and 'big D' discourses which are more
general, such as liberalism and environmentalism. 'Sustainability' can thus be seen as
a Discourse within which other discourses operate, such as those surrounding the
social, bio-physical environmental and economic. These, in tum, play host to range of
other discourses of which the urban, resource management, justice and profit are but a
few.
History is the arena within which macro-level analyses can take place. Both
Nietzsche's and Foucault's work around genealogies is critical here because fonnal
accounts of history are not necessarily good accounts of what happened so much as a
documentation of who was able to get their ideas put down for posterity. This
awareness ofhistory's pennutability has filtered through into popular literature and
the arts, from bumper stickers stating 'Eve was Framed' to books, such as Umberto
Eco's Baudolino (2002) or even Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code which is rumoured to be
among the best selling books of all time. These all alert us to the need to be mindful
of history because history is a record of particular relationships between truth,
knowledge and power (Danaher, Schirato, Webb, 2000, p. xi).
In tenns of my own work, one ofthe more important aspects of macro-level social
analysis pertains to significant developments and changes to the ways in which
resources (including 'human' resources) are understood and used. Another aspect is
the concept of the urban which has undergone many iterations, particularly since the
Industrial Revolution that has led to the urbanisation of much of the West's
population. As a corollary, explanations of the urban and urban change have
proliferated, but some of the more interesting and influential include the Chicago
37
School's 'classic' urban ecology, recent developments in urban [political] ecology
and urban regime theory. I discuss the urban condition further in Chapter Four, but
here I would like to focus specifically on the role of discourse in the theorisation of
urban change and policy directed towards sustainability. Desfor and Keil (2004, pp.
46-47) also have a keen interest in this but note that 'little work has been done to
clarify the role of symbolic and discursive processes in the emergence of urban
regulation, regime and governance'.
Though not concerned with urban areas per se, Rydin's (1999) examination of
discourse around environmental sustainability highlights the disparity between the
concept's normative potential and its ambiguity which can lead to spirited debate
around particular policies. She noted that these arguments 'are related to the structures
of interests and power in society, though not determined by them' . And while
environmental policy discourses 'reflect. .. the societal structures of power ... they also
have potential to change them' (1999, p. 481). Such change, according to Hastings
(1999), can occur through the alteration and modification of institutional structures
and, in this view, it is literally possible to 'talk ourselves into it' (Rydin, 1999).
Importantly, this conceptualisation of the role of discourse in environmental policy
formation rests on the ways in which linguistic practices condense into coherent
coalitions which are then able to fulfil a normative function (also see Molotch (1976)
and Gibbs and Jonas (2000».
Others dispute this model which, in the final analysis, is predicated upon good
communication and understanding between the various parties involved. Instead they
emphasise the struggle or the 'interweaving of disparate discursive acts' (Desfor and
38
Keil, 2004, p. 47) associated with political undertakings (see, for example, Hajer,
1995a and b, 1999,2000; Sharp and Richardson, 2001). In this model, which is
loosely based on the work of Foucault, discourses are seen as 'different systems of
meaning' which compete and subsequently affect social change (Sharp and
Richardson, 2001, p. 196). This competition, of course, takes on a particular
significance in a democracy where progress involves not only institutional and
constitutional reform, but also head-on conflict, coalition- building, changing the
ground rules or exposing the relationship between rationality and power (Flyvbjerg,
1998, p. 236). At the heart ofthis approach is a return to questions about truth, which
is attributed to some statements, by some people, but not others (Sharp and
Richardson, 2001). Because there is no absolute truth, "'good" social change cannot
be pre-specified by theory' (Sharp and Richardson, p. 198) and other factors, such as
practice, power and competition, come into play.
In a similar tradition but with a different emphasis, Murdoch (2000,2004) is critical
of a discursive tum he sees as divorced from geography and argues for a return to
Foucault's focus on the materiality or governmentality of discourse (also see Bulkeley
(2006) who has adopted a similar approach). This refers to the process whereby
specific discourses are reified and quite literally made concrete in particular ways,
such as the architecture of prisons and hospitals. Importantly, these physical
manifestations are accompanied by political rationalities which Rose and Miller (1992
in Murdoch, 2004, p. 51) describe as 'discursive fields within which the exercise of
power is conceptualised'. These rationalities, in turn, call upon particular technologies
or 'programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures
through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions
39
(Rose and Miller, 1992 in Murdoch, 2004, p. 51). These, in effect, bring us a full
circle as they essentially refer to the inscription devices and method assemblages Law
(2004) describes in his articulation of how realities are made.
In light of my objectives regarding an exploration of urban practitioners'
interpretations of urban sustainability, none of which is more 'true' than any other, it
is important that the focus of my investigation rests with how these understandings
are made and acted upon. The methods and tools of symbolic interactionists and
discourse analysts are both useful in this endeavour as both approaches are more keen
to explore the nature ofthis manufacture of truth than to evaluate it against some
external and objective criteria. They also are compatible in terms of suitable matter
for data collection and methods. They are complementary in the sense that while
symbolic interactionists are perhaps more attentive to the intersubjective elements of
everyday life, discourse analysts are arguably more sensitive to conflict and structural
change. The notion of govemrnentality and the rationalities that underpin the
reification of concepts like urban sustainability are particularly pertinent here.
40
Chapter Three: The Rationalities of Sustainability - Some Slippery Concepts
It has been argued thatthe concept of sustainability as an aspiration centred around
the survival of the human race emerged during the 1960s and 1970s (Holdgate, 1990).
There were, however, a number of developments that were prerequisite to this line of
thought. The concept of extinction, for example, had to be invented. Diamond
provides an interesting account of this in his explanation of why human fossils were
not 'found' until 1856 when workers in the Neander Valley in Germany discovered
the bones of Neanderthal Man. He argued that, of course, the bones had already been
found and the evidence had been there all along, only the interpretation had changed.
He explained:
Species were thought of as immutable. Fossils that had been found for 300 years were not regarded as they are now, because that would imply species can become extinct. This is a difficult perception if it is taken to mean that God is a poor designer and if your initial premise is God's perfection (Diamond, 1986, p. 12).
Darwin's Origin o/Species (1859) was very influential as it challenged religious
explanations of existence in favour of an evolutionary account where extinction and
survival were central. These ideas could then infonn new debates around resource use
and distribution.
Grove (1990) claims that ideas about conservation and the use of resources have
always been highly politicised and that scientists were manipulating state policy by
playing on fears of demonstrable and seemingly objective evidence of 'environmental
cataclysm' (p. 15) as early as the mid-eighteenth century. These stemmed, in large
part, from the explorations of early colonialists whose newly' discovered' islands
41
came to be seen in practical and mental terms as a metaphor for the whole world and
destruction on a global scale. The demise of the friendly dodo on the island of
Mauritius provided an excellent case in point. Along with extinction, the scientific
body of knowledge about different world climates also grew, and this was used in
arguments around appropriate paths for development and growth. Grove (1990, p. 25)
noted that 'Scientists discovered that the threat of artificially-induced climatic change
... was one of the few really effective instruments that could be employed in
persuading governments of the seriousness of environmental crisis'. As an example,
he cites J. Spotswood Wilson's 1858 address to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science where he warned that the atmosphere and water were:
slowly approaching a state in which it will be impossible for man to continue as an inhabitant. .. as inferior races preceded man and enjoyed existence before the earth had arrived at a state suitable to his constitution, it is more probable that others will succeed him when the conditions necessary for his existence have passed away.
The confluence of such ideas as extinction and climate change fitted nicely within a
new scientific discourse surrounding 'the environment', and this was complemented
by the Romantic Movement's worship of 'nature'. Post-World War Two education,
increasingly higher rates of literacy and the rise of the mass media helped make both
nature and the environment a part of the lingua franca for both rural and urban
residents.
42
Early Conceptualisations of Sustainability
By the 1960s and 1970s the less flattering effects of human 'supremacy on earth'
were widely televised and publicised and this led to a wave of environmental concern,
exemplified in increasingly popular literature like Carson's Silent Spring (1962). In
1972 Donella and Donald Meadows published The Limits to Growth (Club of Rome,
1972), which was based on a computerised model condition on planet Earth called
'World 3'. The assumptions behind the model were that pollution, population and
production would continue the trend of exponential growth, and the authors concluded
that because the world's resources are finite its limits must eventually be (b )reached
resulting in a crash to poverty, overcrowding and hunger (See Basiago, 1998;
Wackernagel and Yount 2000). Their advice was to recycle, reduce population,
reduce consumption and peg capital investment levels to depreciation. These concerns
were mirrored by the editors of The Ecologist (1972) in a Blueprint for Survival and at
the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm the same
year.
Figure 2: Fragile' Lifeboat' Earth
(www .southbaymobilization.org)
43
Torgerson (1995, pp. 3-4) sees the publication of The Limits to Growth as a crucial
turning point in the evolution of the concept of sustainable development. He noted
that it was during this time that the idea of 'limits' was injected into public discourse,
however, the apocalyptic visions presented by limits theorists were vastly at odds with
the 'ideological context'. This, he argues, was based on the modem conception of
progress with its roots in nineteenth century positivism, exemplified in approaches to
resource management such as the 'maximum sustainable yield' (see Black, 1995 and
Frazier, 1997 for a critique ofthis approach 15). The ideology of industrialisation,
according to Torgerson (1995, p. 9), involved images of 'unified knowledge, purpose
and power' and a belief in the ability of humankind to exert mastery over the natural
world. In an attempt to make limits theory more palatable to this audience by
invoking images of 'vitality and dynamism within the context of an equilibrium state'
and at the same time' avoid the connotation of stagnation' while subordinating it to
avoiding global catastrophe the Meadows cite John Stuart Mill at length:
It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on. Even the industrial arts might be earnestly and successfully cultivated, with this sole difference, that instead of serving no purpose but the increase of wealth, industrial improvements would produce their legitimate effect, that of abridging labour. Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish (1865, p. 756-7, in Torgerson, 1995, p. 8).
15 Many of the problems with the MSY approach, such as nature's economy being neither 'equilibrated nor predictable' (Black, 1995, p. 22), can also be applied to the idea of carrying capacity.
44
The growth trajectory did not change along these lines, however. While the notion of
'limits' could be accommodated within a framework which adhered to the efficient
use of (scarce) resources, the Meadows' outright challenge to the growth model and
its ultimate purpose was unlikely to meet with widespread approval and support from
powerful interests.
The Brundtland Report and Sustainable Development
This is a point over which the so-called Brundtland Report Our Common Future
(WECD, 1987) and Limits to Growth part company. Although the two-word term
'sustainable development' is said to have been used first by the United Nations
Environment Programme and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) in 1980 (Basiago, 1998, Frazier, 1997) it was the Brundtland Report that truly
popularised the concept. It was here that' sustainable development' was first defined
as 'Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs' (p. 40). Although this definition is the
one used most often, it is a relatively small part of a larger construct: The report
makes a number of points with their objectives comprising reviving growth; changing
the quality of growth; meeting essential needs for jobs, food, energy, water, and
sanitation; ensuring a sustainable level of population; conserving and enhancing the
resource base; reorienting technology and managing risk; merging the environment
and economics in decision-making; and reorienting international economic relations
(1987, p. 49).
45
Economic growth takes a central role in this model though its legitimacy rests on its
potential to address wider social and bio-physical environmental concerns by tying
resource depletion to poverty (p. 3). That poverty is a major cause and effect of global
environmental problems also raised questions of equity both within and between
nations and generations. A rather less well-publicised part of the report states that
'Sustainable global development requires that those who are more affluent adopt
lifestyles within the planet's ecological means' and that 'Painful choices have to be
made [meaning that] in the final analysis, sustainable development must rest on
political will' (p.9). They state that it may be the case that 'growth' requires a full
account of the costs of 'environmental destruction' (p.37) not least because the bio
physical environment and economics are linked to many social and political factors.
Furthermore, they suggest that' It could be argued that the distribution of power and
influence within society lies at the heart of most development challenges' (p.37).
Contentiously, the report states that the concept of sustainable development' does
imply limits - not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of
technology and social organisation of environmental resources and by the ability of
the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities' but that 'technology and social
organisation can both be managed and improved to make way for a new era of
economic growth' (p.8). Finally, the report makes it clear that 'Far from requiring
cessation of economic growth ... the problems of poverty and underdevelopment
cannot be solved unless we have a new era of growth in which developing countries
playa large role and reap large benefits' (p.40).
46
Though the definition of sustainable development (and even sustainability) is often
limited to 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs', it is clear that this provides a
neat bypass around many complex and controversial ideas that deserve to be explored
in more detail.
Limits to growth or the growth of limits?
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Brundtland Report is the role of
economic growth. This is because so many observers believe the pursuit of economic
growth is the cause ofbio-physical environmental degradation and not, emphatically,
its solution! O'Riordan has called it 'a contradiction in terms' (1985; also see
Redclift, 1987), Lele 'an attempt to have one's cake and eat it too' (1991, p. 618),
Frazier an 'international craze' which has become a 'source of confusion, contention,
and even deception' (1997, p 182; see also Howart, 1997). Smail (2002) finds the idea
of sustainable growth (' growth' being an integral part of the concept of sustainable
development) 'at best a continuing exercise in economic self-deception and at worst a
politically pernicious oxymoron' (p.27). Torgerson (1995, p. 10) seemed to agree, as
he wrote:
Ironically, the idea [of sustainable development] appears to carry the same presuppositions which, environmentalism had charged, supported unsustainable development in the first place - especially, the confident expectation that development, in any conventional meaning of the term, can actually be sustained.
Gleeson and Low (2000, p. 3) argue that the idea of sustainable development has
changed from the original model founded on 'a specific ethical content... based on the
assumption of a virtuous form of growth in which the masses come to share in a
general prosperity in which everyone's needs are met'. This earlier model can be
47
described as 'socially sustainable capitalism' because ifmarkets and enterprises failed
to meet human need, govenunents would intervene. They argue that the current
model, which parades under the banner of sustainable development, is radically
different from the original because the globalisation of the economy has 'imposed a
discipline which is patently no longer consistent with the spread of equality and the
meeting of need' (p.4). The effect is that ecologically and socially sustainable
development is a far more distant prospect, one that will have to be negotiated in a
'terrain of conflict' (Baureidl and Wissen, 2002, p. 108).
Willers (1994), a biologist and self-described 'conservationist' (pers. com. 02/04)
appeared to share these concerns when he explicitly questioned the utility of the tenn,
seeing it as a figurehead of a blatant conspiracy where 'sustainable development' is
simply a code for 'perpetual growth' (p.1146). He wrote:
The maxim of sustainable development is not 'limits to growth'; it is the 'growth oflimits'. The concept ... has been force-fed to the world community by the global corporate political media network that is paving the way for a New World Order ... It comes to us on a daily basis, packaged in such a sugar coat that to refute it is to seem unpatriotic especially when continued growth and development are presented as compatible with 'respecting environmental constraints'. But proponents of sustainable development do not respect environmental constraints, and they ignore the fact that the First World has long since lived beyond sustainability. Indeed they hold up the over-consumptive lifestyle of industrialised society as the standard ... Sustainable development guarantees the continued deterioration of ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity (pp.1146-7).
In a personal communication (02/04) Willers noted that he has collected more reprint
requests on that one article than on all other articles of his career together. He takes
that to perhaps mean a 'distrust' of the concept. This distrust is perhaps not surprising
48
given the World Bank is one of the central agencies monitoring environmental policy.
While some have seen this as proof that 'the environment' is on the world agenda,
others (see, for example, Buhrs, 2000; Grundy, 2000; Elander and Lidskog, 2000)
have pointed out that this appointment does not mark the success of
environmentalists, but rather their total collapse.
Rees has long been one of the more outspoken and clearly articulate critics of the
concept of sustainable development and it is worth outlining some of his arguments.
First he accounts for the popularity of the idea in the following way:
This innocuously skeletal definition [of sustainable development in the Brundtland Report] gave something to everyone, and academia, governments, and non-government organisations have been striving ever since to flesh it out. As global ecological conditions worsen, any concept that implies we can have our development cake and have the environment too naturally inspires enthusiasm on all sides of the debate . .. . Environmentalists ... on the political left emphasise the 'sustainable' part .... Economic planners, the political centre and all those to the right lay stress on the 'development' component .... From this perspective, there are no limits, growth comes first, the present system works, and the global expansion of market economies will create all the wealth needed for world ecological and social security (1998, p. 20).
He points out that the Brundtland Report reassures us that sustainable development
does not depend on a 'fixed state of harmony' but will involve change in which 'the
exploitation of resources, the orientation of technological development, and
institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs' (WeED,
1987, p. 9). Rees highlights the report's advice on achieving sustainable development
as resting on increased international investment; an expanded role for transnational
corporations; the removal of 'artificial barriers to commerce'; and expanded global
trade (Rees, 1998, p. 20-21). Because it essentially advocates a market-driven
49
economy and 'trickle-down economics', and fails to address over-consumption, Rees
believes the Brundtland Report to be a 'thoroughly conventional statement'. He
supports Trainer's (1990, p. 72) view that the report simply constitutes 'an
enthusiastic and unquestioning reaffirmation of the system, lifestyles, and values that
are causing the problems under discussion'. Similar arguments have been put forward
by a number of other critics. Carvalho (2001), for example, is sceptical of the concept
because adopting strategies that are conducive to truly sustainable development (if we
knew what that was) would be nearly impossible given the current international
political system (see also Yanarella and Bartilow, 2000; Glasby, 2002) have
expressed similar concerns.
As a proponent of ecological integrity, the continued focus on growth as a solution to
social and environmental problems is cause for alarm, and Rees laments the lack of a
meaningful distinction between growth which refers to a quantitative expansion of the
economic system and development which describes a qualitative change in an
economic system in a state ofbio-physical environmental equilibrium (based on Daly
and Cobb, 1989). Indeed, Rees has a great deal more to say about the economic
system which he refers to as 'a sister science' of Newtonian physics based on the
'mechanics of utility and self-interest' (Jevons, 1879, in Georgescu-Roegen, 1975, in
Rees, 1998, p. 25). Rees argues that while economics should be a branch of human
,ecology, it actually uses a mechanical model based on three assumptions that connect
closely with the nature/society distinction discussed in Chapter One. The first is that
human enterprise is seen as dominating, and independent of, nature and this has
separated the economy from material reality. The second is that economics has
adopted a 'circular flow of exchange value' as opposed to the 'one-way entropic
50
throughput of matter' meaning that production and consumption are (mistakenly) seen
as self-sustaining. Finally, resources are more commonly seen as the result of human
ingenuity rather than a product of nature.
Economic, Rio-physical Environmental and Social Sustainability
Many of the critiques outlined here are the result of different emphases in the
balancing of social, economic and bio-physical environmental goals. Values
surrounding growth, development, conservation and so on are integral to the concept
of sustainability; however, the weight given to each varies considerably across
different actors. Although such frequent invocation of the term does not necessarily
reflect this, sustainability and sustainable development are complex terms that attempt
to address a number of disparate and sometimes incompatible ideas surrounding the
bio-physical environment, society and the economy. I would like now to explore some
of these facets in more detail.
Economic sustainability
The notion of economic sustainability enjoys a number of perspectives within the
sustainability/sustainable development literature though it is usually tied to
assumptions about continued growth and profitability. Harris and Goodwin (2001, p.
xxix), for example, have described an economically sustainable system as one that can
'produ~e goods and services on a continuing basis, to maintain manageable levels of
government and external debt, and to avoid extreme sectoral imbalances that damage
agricultural or industrial production'. It is this notion of achieving these goals on 'a
continuing basis' that is among the more contentious of issues surrounding economic
growth and there are varying opinions as to the conditions under which they might be
51
achieved. Within the economic sustainability literature, these opinions tend to
constellate around specific attitudes towards economic growth, resource limits and the
ways in which these limits are changing.
In the pre-industrial age, very little attention was directed towards growth and it was
thought that it could be achieved only via an increase in taxation or population. By the
late 1700s, however, the notion that economic growth could occur through other
means became widespread. Nowadays, orthodox thought is that economic growth can
be generated via economic surplus based on the productive capacity of the nation
that is, the percentage rate of increase (or decrease) in the wealth or income of a
nation (or other entity). This is typically measured in tenns of gross domestic product,
which is often taken to reflect the average standard of living within a nation.
Literature devoted to economic sustainability contributes to this notion of economic
growth by exposing GDP as a rather blunt instrument that fails to address general
well-being, unpaid work such as housekeeping or child care or inequalities in the
distribution of wealth. More fundamentally, much of this emergent literature
advocates a substantially revised treatment ofbio-physical environmental externalities
within future discounting procedures where the 'true' costs of resource use are
accounted for (Szenberg, 2000). Sen's (1992, 1999) conceptualisation of welfare
economics has been influential in the recognition of these factors as missing in
orthodox neo-classical accounts, and this has since been made the centrepiece of the
United Nations' Human Development Programme. The Index of Sustainable
Economic Welfare developed by Daly and Cobb (1989) and later used to fonn the
Genuine Progress Indicators also represents an attempt to include such items in
measures of a nation's health. The Sustainable National Income model initially
52
developed by Hueting (Hueting and Reijnders, 2004) is similar but more limited in its
focus on bio-physical environmental issues.
Traditionally, economists have assumed that the supply of natural resources and sinks
for waste were unlimited and that the appropriate management of human capital was
most essential to continued economic growth. While there has always been an
awareness of natural resource limits it was largely assumed that gadgetary, technology
and scientific innovation, would ensure substitutes would be found for diminishing
resources. This assumed fungibility has now been called into question and this debate
lies at the core of economic sustainability. As Constanza and Daly (2001, p. 15)
noted:
Economic theory has focussed on manufactured and human capital, because natural capital has been implicitly or explicitly viewed as abundant. But we are now entering an era where natural rather than manufactured or human capital will be the limiting factor on economic activity.
Bio-physical environmental sllstainability
Bio-physical environmental sustainability is basically concerned with the state of
nature's stock or natural resources though there are many different positions on how
to assess this and what actions should be taken based on these assessments. Gleeson
and Low (2000) propose distinctions be made over attitudes towards the extent to
which resources are Se_en as interchangeable and the degree to which resources should
be employed in the service of humanity. These distinctions form the basis of a
'ladder' of sustainable development. 16 The bottom rung of the ladder represents a
16 Similarly, Urich (1999) has adapted Colby's (1990) schema of sustainability paradigms which range through 'very strongly anthropocentric', 'strongly anthropocentric', 'modified anthropocentric' , 'ecocentric' and 'biocentric'.
53
'treadmill' approach which exudes faith in the ability oftechnological innovation to
solve environmental problems and the bio-physical environment is seen as providing
a resource base for economic growth. 'Weak sustainable development' forms the
second rung of the ladder which, according to Gleeson and Low, is best described by
Pearce et al (1989). Here, the principles from neoclassic economics and market-based
mechanisms, such as appropriate pricing of externalities, are thought to be able to
cope with any bio-physical environmental problems. Desfor and Keil (2004, pp. 56-
57) posit that weak versions tend to be 'economistic in focus, ... technical,
instrumental, [and] national'. The third rung is called 'strong sustainable
development' and this requires political intervention and regulation to ensure the bio
physical environment is protected. Desfor and Keil (2004, pp. 56-57) argue that
strong versions are 'ecological, institutional, communicative, democratic ... and [have]
the built in capacity for social and environmental change'. Such descriptions are
roughly consistent with other authors' articulations of strong and weak sustainability
more generally (EI Serafy, 2001; Harris and Goodwin, 2001; Munda, 2001; Welch,
2003). Finally, the 'radical' model of sustainable development can be found at the top
of the ladder. It is considered radical because mere tweaking of the current economic
system is insufficient; a more radical approach is required. This model is ecocentric
and uses concepts from 'deep ecology' (Lovelock, 1987, 1995: Devall and Sessions,
1985; and Naess, 1989 and Echlin, 1996 in Gleeson and Low, 2000). The integrity of
the planet's ecosystems is to be preserved above all else and this represents a serious
challenge to current growth models. Advocates of the radical model put forward some
ofthe more strident and apocalyptic visions associated the sustainability imperative
and it is important to note that their proposals tend to be not only anti-growth but
sometimes misanthropic as well. Some of Lovelock's (1987,1995) writing, for
54
example, seems to take great delight in the possibility of an almost sentient Gaia
taking revenge on a recalcitrant human race by manufacturing our extinction. Such
accounts take nature's· agency further than most.
Evaluating the integrity of the planet's ecosystems and developing ways of
preserving or enhancing that integrity have been the focus of a great deal of research
and scholarly enterprise. Within the physical sciences, much of this effort has been
directed at objectively identifying limits and developing technical means of
addressing environmental problems. Within the social scientific literature, the
carrying capacity of different areas (Smail, 2002; Wackernagel and Yount, 2003) and
a given entity's (from a person to a nation/state or even the world's population)
ecological footprint are popular ideas (Walker and Rees, 1997; Rees, 1997a and b)
that are now being used by local authorities to calculate their environmental impact.
The ecological footprint has been defined as 'the total area of productive land and
water required on a continuous basis to produce all the resources consumed, and to
assimilate all the waste produced by that population' (Walker and Rees, 1997, p. 97).
A plethora of social scientific studies have since been directed at how society or social
systems must change in order to address bio-physical environmental concerns based
upon, for example, consumption patterns (Callenbach, 1999; Ackerman, 2001 a and
b), indicators (Farrell and Hart, 1998; Parris, 2003, van Kamp, Leidelmeijer,
Marsman and Hollander, 20Q3), governance and strategies for implementation
Jepson, 2003; van Bueren and Heuvelhof, 2005), urban form (English, 1999; Jenks,
Burton and Williams, 1996, 1998, 2000) and so on. Coming from the social sciences,
55
much of this work is concerned with broader views of sustainability that address not
only bio-physical environmental aspects, but social issues as well
Social sustain ability
Of the three components of what might be called orthodox accounts of sustainability
and sustainable development, social aspects undoubtedly suffer the most from a lack
of attention, clarity and understanding. The inclusion of social sustainability can be
attributed to the Brundtland Report's contention that poverty is a major cause and
effect of global environmental problems and, as a corollary, that inter- and intra-
generational equity, meeting 'needs', and the distribution of power and resources are
essential components of sustainable development. This raises some very interesting
questions about the role/goal of social sustainability in areas where poverty is not
necessarily linked to bio-physical environmental degradation. While the connection
between socio-economic and natural resource depletion might be valid in cases where,
for example, the fisherman has a choice between over-fishing an area or starvation,
the link is weaker for poor people in urban areas who lack access to any natural
resources at all.
Though he does not focus on urban areas as such, Dobson (1998, p. 15), was
concerned with such issues when he wrote:
It is unlikely ... that poor people are always forced to overuse environmental resources [because] ... poor people do not always and everywhere live in conditions characterised by resource scarcity, so the conclusion reached by the [Brundtland] Commission is not as universally relevant to environmental sustainability as its report suggests.
56
Portney (2003, p.l61) has also addressed this matter, noting 'For many, the idea that
social justice must be pursued as a component of sustainability is an assumption, or
starting point, that needs no explanation'. Portney, having made this point, justifies
his own inclusion of social sustainability by way of arguments pertaining to
environmental justice which advances the notion that minorities tend to bear the brunt
ofbio-physical environmental risks. Portney's conclusion is that, in terms of
sustainability, issues around environmental justice can be useful when it makes the
siting of unfavourable facilities and activities more equitable, or when it facilitates
more favourable environmental outcomes overall (also see Agyeman and Evans,
2004). Portney falls short of suggesting that only when environmental risk and harm
is evenly distributed among both the affluent and the poor alike will bio-physical
environmental issues receive widespread attention. In short, the rather limited
literature addressing this first question of the rolel goal of social sustainability in areas
where poverty is not necessarily linked to bio-physical environmental degradation
might be that it is justified when adverse effects are linked to powerlessness.
The rolelgoal of social issues when general allusions to sustainability and urban
sustainability are put forward over specific references to sustainable development is
more difficult to address. Dobson's targeted justification aside, how do we justify and
incorporate social concerns into the sustainability concept when development is not
an ostensible focus as seems to be the case outside the Third World. The term
'sustainability' is becoming increasingly ubiquitous l7 and the assumption that it has
some benevolent, if undefined, social component has no doubt facilitated its
enthusiastic adoption. The frequency with which it is invoked does not necessarily
17 Sustainable communities, urban sustainability and sustainable management are among the more common.
57
correlate positively with clarity surrounding its use, however. I have identified at least
three strands within the literature which point to quite contradictory treatments of the
notion of social sustainability. I 8 Each has slightly different antecedents and emphases
and not everyone has an explicit link to the bio-physical environment. This highlights
the extent to which slippage is occurring within the social sustainability discourse.
Maintenance Sustainabili ty
The first strand identified concerns the notion whereby social and cultural
characteristics are maintained in the face of global connections and influences,
technological innovation and, certainly in New Zealand, issues such as immigration,
employment opportunities and contracts, and other forces of change. The discourse of
'maintenance sustainability' highlights the difficulties of reconciling what is to be
sustained as opposed to what is to be developed (Kates, Parris, and Leiserowitz, 2005;
Board on Sustainable Development of the United States National Academy of
Sciences, 1999; Munro, 1995; Redclift, 2000). In terms of urban sustainabilitymore
specifically, how cities manage, maintain or ignore socio-economic and cultural
change in the age of 'globalisation' has been the focus of work by Borja and Castells
(1997; also see Sandercock, 2004). Rather than a city divided along traditional class
lines, they note that:
Our societies, in all latitudes, are and will be multicultural, and the cities (especially the large cities) are the places in -which the greatest diversity is concentrated. Learning to live with the situation, succeeding in managing cultural exchange on the basis of ethnic difference and remedying the inequalities arising from discrimination are essential aspects of the new local policy in the conditions arising out of the new global interdependence (Borja and Castells, 1997, p. 89).
18 A similar schema has been proposed by Chiu (2003).
58
Maintenance social sustainability is often implicit in much of the sustainable
communities literature where established or traditional values, such as
neighbourliness, family-mindedness or friendliness, are promoted (see Roseland,
1997, 1998).
Social Development Sustainability
The second strand that I have identified in the literature relates more specifically to
poverty and inequitable access to resources in both a global and intergenerational
sense (Barkin, 2000; Polese and Stren, 2000; Smail 2002; Goodwin, 2003). Harris and
Goodwin (2001, p. xxvii) define social sustainability as 'progress toward enabling all
human beings to satisfy their essential needs, and to share fairly in all opportunities
for health and education'. Significantly, they also note that 'Thus defined, human
development is a final goal: an end to which other important pursuits, such as
economic development, are the means'. The literature pertaining to this version of
social sustainability is not confined to poorer nations (Polese and Stren, 2000,
Freeman and Thompson-Fawcett, 2003, Turner and Turner, 2003) but an important
part of this problematic is the poverty/population growth conundrum of poorer nations
(Pimental, Bailey, Kim, Mullaney, Calabrese, Walman, Nelson, and Yao, 1999;
Smail, 2002). Although the links between ecological degradation and poverty are
often made (Boyce, 1995), particularly under the rubric ofthe so-called- 'brown
agenda' (Polese and Stren, 2000, p. 15), these are often presented in terms of how a
healthy bio-physical environment is just one part of an approach to all-round well
being as a goal in itself (Wise, 2001). This type of social sustainability in urban areas
is the focus of UNESCO's Management of Social Transfonnations Programme,
59
initiated in 1994, which sees cities as 'arenas of accelerated social transfonnations'
(Polese and Stren, 2000, p. ix). Here they argue that cities are key in move towards
increased solidarity, justice and equity.
Bridge Sustainability
The third strand talks about social sustainability in tenns of how society must change
in order to be more sustainable in a bio-physical environmental sense. Foladori (2005)
calls this 'bridge sustainability' because the ultimate aim is bio-physical
environmental, rather than social, sustainability. Discussion in this vein tends to
centre on consumption patterns, recycling or travel habits, particularly private motor-
vehicle use in developed countries and on the over-exploitation of resources in
poverty-stricken areas (Pacione, 2001; Finco and Nijkamp, 2001; the WeED, 1987;
Ackennan, 2001; O'Meara Sheehan, 2001). The consumption patterns of people in
developed countries are fairly well-documented I 9, with strong ties to Rees' (1997b)
notion of ecological footprints and the adverse effects of profligate lifestyles. These
include McGranahan, Songsore and Kjellen's (1996) observationthat with increased
affluence environmental problems tend to shift geographically from the local to the
regional or global and temporally from immediate health problems to
intergenerational impacts including global wanning. They take issue with the ways in
which the affluent 'distribute their environmental burdens over an expanding public'
(1996, p. 105). More as a matter for clarification than advocacy, Anand and Sen
(2000) warn us not to become confused at this point and attempt to equate social
sustainability with notions of hunger or access to clean water because these are not
19 According to the United Nations Development Progral11l11e (1998) statistics, the richest 20 per cent of the world's population consumes 86 per cent of available resources. At the other end of the scale, the poorest 20 per cent of people consume only 1.3 per cent of resources.
60
'ecological'and thus do not meet the definitions laid out by, for example, the World
Bank.
Foladori is somewhat critical of this kind of 'bridge' sustain ability because social
sustainability is treated as a means rather than an end in itself. Yet there is another
vein which goes deeper than this; it is one that would see overt changes in, for
example, recycling behaviour as a manifestation of a more powerful shift in
consciousness that relates to the way we understand nature as might be seen in
Heidegger's notion of dwelling and the growing literature devoted to hybridity and
the new political ecology. Yet, Foladori makes a valid point in that the fairly
superficial aspects of bridge sustainability are more commonly visible, particularly
when it is invoked as a necessary response to a technically determined concern.
Although clearly social, the fix is frequently presented in terms of simple technical
adjustments that reduce the social contribution and social consequences to a bare
minimum. Portney (2003, p. 128) relays a good example of this commonplace:
If a city has an internal air pollution problem, so the argument goes, correcting the problem is a job for professionals ... [But] if air pollution is a purely technical problem, then why have we not corrected the problem years ago?
The answer, he suggests, is that we have too sparse an understanding of
communitarian conceptions of sustainability, political will and the values and
attitudes that underlie them to achieve sustainability, and this ties bridge sustainability
quite firmly to concerns about what needs to be changed andlor maintained in our
society.
61
In short we have a number different conceptualisations of social sustainability and
each of these have slightly (or vastly) different emphases and priorities. Maintenance
and bridge sustainability, for example, are often fundamentally contradictory
particularly when long-standing traditions are challenged by new measures put
forward to combat adverse environmental or economic effects.2o China's one child
policy, for example, may well be necessary in tenns of economic stability and self-
sufficiency or bio-physical environmental resource use, but it is antithetical to long-
standing beliefs surrounding the role of the family and ancestors. 21 Here in New
Zealand and elsewhere, it is common to invoke the compact city as the most
sustainable urban fonn, yet this necessarily entails a profound alteration of the built
environment that challenges established senses of place and liveability associated with
low-density suburban living (Lewis, 1999; Godschalk, 2004; Vallance, Perkins and
Moore, 2005). In a third example, one might ask how quality oflife, which often
seems to be expressed in patterns of over-consumption, can be reconciled with bio-
physical environmental limits. The issues of 'sustainable consumption' is one that is
rarely addressed (Hobson, 2003), possibly because a serious attempt at this goal
would threaten current economic growth orthodoxies. As Webster (1998) pointed out,
we have to be attentive to the ways in which policies directed towards sustainability
are themselves sustainable in tenns of reflecting the preferences of residents. These
three examples of conflict between the different fonns of social sustainability
highlights an earlier point that what is to be sustained, for whom and for how long
very much depends on which construal one has adopted. The operationalisation of the
tenn is responsive to these vagaries of interpretation and this raises questions about
20 Lai (1998) has made a similar point, though he does not use the terms 'bridge' and 'maintenance' sustainability. 21 Paehlke (1995) presents an interesting discussion on the need to balance bio-physical environmental concerns with democratic practice, as does Albrecht (2001).
62
how, or indeed if, the various components of this slippery concept might be
reconciled.
Reconciling Sustain ability
Problems with definitions and the practice of sustainability have led to a burgeoning
literature concerned with exposing the concept as inherently flawed. Since the
Brundtland Report the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development have
been criticised for containing a number of seemingly irreconcilable positions
surrounding growth, development, the purpose of growth, means and ends. These
divisions are often seen as occurring along economic growth versus economic
development, strong versus weak sustainability, radical versus incremental change,
ecological modernisation versus risk or along disciplinary lines as economic, bio
physical environmental and social aspects are debated. Unreflective use ofterms like
sustainability and sustainable development often camouflage these points of
contention. As Bruff and Wood (2000, p. 593) noted, while such terms have the
potential to smooth over conflicts between environment and development and
different political actors, unthinking promulgation means we risk 'replacing
intellectual thought with moral conviction based around a slogan'. It is therefore
necessary for me to explore some of these points in more detail.
Economic growth versus economic development
Although it has become common to question the quality of economic growth, it is
more rare for decision-makers to challenge the goal of growth itself. The quest for
economic growth in tenns of sustainable development is usually justified by the
63
notion that that benefits can, and do, 'trickle down' to the poor (Basiago, 1999). It is
also believed that only through economic growth can we develop the technology
necessary to repair the damage already inflicted on the bio-physical environment
which forms the economists' 'natural capital' and the basis ofthe Environmental
Kuznet's Curve.22 An alternative, more contentious view, is that many so-called
primitive societies (inc~uding the aborigines of Australia) managed to sustain
themselves with very small ecological footprints for many millennia, and that current
policies around economic growth and development can actually have a profoundly
destabilising effect. Sensitivity to these issues has led to some making the distinction
between economic growth and economic development (Skinner, 1997; Basiago, 1999,
Constanza and Daly, 2001). Basiago (1999, p.1S1) describes this 'new doctrine' of
economic development as one that attends to qualitative rather than quantitative
growth. This does, however, present a new array of problems.
The first major hurdle to be crossed involves acknowledging, measuring and
accommodating the 'costs' or 'externalities' of both qualitative and quantitative
growth. As Finco and Nijkamp (2001) noted 'The unpriced nature of many
environmental goods makes it difficult to incorporate the environment into the normal
calculation schemes of rational market behaviour' but this is now a basic tenet ofthe
new formal field of environmental economics which demands that bio-physical
environmental and, sometimes, social externalities be identified, calculated and
accounted for. Ecological economics therefore specifically focuses on interactions
between the environment and the economy whilst recognising that various aspects of
22 According to the Kuznets Curve hypothesis, there is an inverted relationship between environmental degradation and income levels. This has been taken to mean that economic growth is the best means of reducing the environmental impacts associated with the early stages of economic development (Stern, 2001).
64
each are, in fact, incommensurable and cannot be easily traded. It is based on 'post-
nonnal science' which 'recognises facts are uncertain, values in dispute' (Munda,
2001, p. 18). Caccia (1990, p. 127) admits that the market is far from being 'free' but
is instead constrained by a number of factors including the internalisation of
externalised costs. Requiring producers to include externalities might make them less
competitive than those who are not subject to a 'comparable regulatory regime'.
Changes in consumer behaviour; an absence of incentives and/or financial aid for the
introduction of more appropriate technology and equipment and price distortions of
water, energy, raw materials also lead to fear among producers. A new order of
political will with new regulations, penalties and incentives will be required so as to
'bend the market place towards long-tenn sustainability' .
Ecological modernisation versus risk
Blowers (1997), Desfor and Keil (2004) and Welch (2003) have identified two broad
schools of thought within the sustainability literature. The first is ecological
modernisation (see Huber, 1982,2000; Hampson, 1990; Hajer, 1995a and b, 1996,
1999; Springett, 2003) whereby bio-physical environmental and social sustainability -I!
can be achieved within the current economic growth and development model. Huber
(1982), Hajer (1996, 1999) and Desfor and Keil (2004) describe ecological
modernisation as involving the transfonnation of industrial production so as to
maintain the productive base of the natural environment though not necessarily the
actual levels of natural capital. This position is largely similar to that represented by
the weak sustainability model outlined above. Technological innovation and
dematerialisation are the cornerstones of our ability to overcome bio-physical
environmental and social challenges. This position relies on a limitless cornucopia -
65
not of nature - but of the human mind and its capacity to innovate and create novel
solutions to emergent problems and scarcities.
This cornucopian view can be contrasted with the risk society model where the
conciliatory methods of ecological modemists intent on maintaining a focus on
economic growth is seen as not only damaging to the bio-physical environment, but as
fundamentally incompatible. The results of pursuing growth in this way include
general, mass-produced and self-induced risks such as global warming, chemical
pollution and nuclear waste disposal problems, ozone depletion, BSE/CJD and so on
(Angell, Comer, Wilkinson, 1990). That these perils are self-produced is captured,
rather potently, by the emergent notion of 'eco-cide' (Diamond, 2004) because, as
Beck noted, some combination of these risks could mean the' self-destruction of all
life on this earth' (1995, p. 67). In contrast to ecological modemists, risk theorists see
science and technology as sources of potentially devastating harm rather than a
solution.23
Many of these risks are not easily evaluated by the lay-person (nor the experts in
some cases, as has been the case with global warming, for example) and this, Beck
believes, creates a condition of increased uncertainty (also see Genov, 1998). Global
ecological risk combined with economic threats, such as unemployment and the
withdrawal of the welfare state, and social problems surrounding crime and divorce
23 Interestingly enough, these two schools of thought - typified by the ecological modernists and the risk society theorists - have coalesced around two political parties here in New Zealand. The New Zealand Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand was formed from a merger of the Values Party and the new Green groups in 1990 and sits very fmnly left of centre. The National Party has recently released its environment strategy (2005) which Member of Parliament Nick Smith (National's environment spokesperson) says is 'rich and clean' (Barnett, 2006, p. 21). This approach is 'based on the principals [sic] of economic growth, resource use [which] must be sustainable, [and] good science' (media release www.national.org.nzlArticle.aspx? Articleld=8298, 12110/06).
66
conspire to instil fear and insecurity (Blowers, 1997). This insecurity is not
necessarily widespread, however. It has been pointed out that while such threats might
contribute to a general sense of insecurity and individualisation, 'abstract risk
manifests itself in real harm to real persons in particular places ... [R]isks are not
evenly distributed' (Field, 1998, in Desfor and Keil, p. 64). Thus a large-scale risk,
such as that from toxic waste, is more likely to affect some than others. A local
example is provided by Pearce, Kingham and Zawar-Reza (2006) who found that
levels of air pollution were higher in areas where disadvantaged communities lived
and that, for the most part, it was not these communities that actually generated most
of this pollution. The waste trade exemplifies this kind of risk at a global scale: as just
one example, in the 1980s Guinea-Bissau was offered the equivalent of its existing
GNP to dispose of hazardous waste from Europe (Smith and Blowers, 1992, in
Gleeson and Low, 2000, p. 20). Some see these kinds of transactions as win-win
situations where the financial compensation received exceeds any immediate or long
term danger. Foster (in Newton, 1999), for example, reports Lawrence Summers'
(then chief economist ofthe World Bank) comment 'I think the economic logic
behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wages countries is impeccable and
we should face up to the fact that...underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly
under-polluted ... Shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirt
industries to the LDCs?' Others, however, argue that such transactions are indicative
of a new wave oflarge scale inequality. Most notably, Beck (1995) has identified a
new phase of 'risk society politics' concerned with uneven economic development
and the distribution of harmful externalities. The environmental justice movement is
explicitly concerned with politicising such injustice and inequality through a thorough
67
reassessment of both the means and ends of growth and our relationship with the bio
physical environment as sources of societal risk and security.
Other critiques
The problems associated with reconciling or balancing economic growth with
development and the contradictions inherent in the ecological modernisation versus
risk society models expose some of the complexities underlying a seemingly
straightforward tenn. In addition to the criticism directed towards the incompatibility
of growth, development and bio-physical environmental sustainability discussed
earlier, there have been a number of other unfavourable assessments ofthe concept
directed towards definitional issues, operationalisation, and other conceptual
contradictions.
Dovers and Handmer (1992) provide a good overview of many ofthe problems and
contradictions with the concept of sustainable development. Their list of problems
correlates with many of the issues already addressed in this thesis, such as technology
being both a 'cure' for environmental problems and a source of risk and higher levels
of consumption; a need to be humble enough to accept our knowledge is limited but
arrogant enough to make decisions; the necessity of balancing intergenerational
versus intra-generational equity; the possibility of reconciling 'growth' and 'limits ';
the need to balance individual freedom and collective interests; the possibility of a
balance to be found between the empowerment of the local population and the need
for a body to set more general objectives; the question of defending the idea of spare
capacity for future generations when many people's needs are not being met at
present; and ways of accommodating both stability and change.
68
This last point highlights another set of problems with the concept of sustainability
which, when seen as a goal as opposed to an ethic, raises questions about incremental
versus radical change (see, for example, Yanarella and Bartilow, 2000). Low (2000) is
also concemed with how the transition to a more.~§tainable world might take place
and has advocated for a 'Polanyian approach' which has, at its foundation, the
concept of' ecosocialisation'. In this tradition, both the market and social
organisations are invoked as composites of this approach, and these must nowadays
incorporate environmental conservation forming a 'triple movement'. This could
perhaps be described as a form of normative incrementalism.
Some see the vagaries of the Brundtland Report's definition as an impediment to any
useful construal ofthe concept which might assist this normative function. Luke
(1995), for example, pointed out that the report does not address questions about
what, exactly, should be sustained, for whom and for how long. Others are more
concemed with the implications such ambiguous definitions of sustainability have for
planning and practice. Overton and Scheyvens (1999, p.1), for example, are critical of
the unreflective use of sustainable development, and conclude that the idea has 'little
to inform practice beyond principles and platitudes'. Such claims are perhaps
understandable in the face of work undertaken by, for example Devuyst and Hens
(2000) and Berke and Conroy (2000) whose evaluation of plans for sustainable
development revealed variation in their adoption and implementation. Dovers and
Norton (1994) and Welch (2003) have argued that the sustainability agenda
challenges powerful interests, is very complex and should be seen more as a moral
principle rather than a set of instructions with which practitioners can work. That the
69
concept is exceedingly difficult to operationalise has led to accusations that that the
concept is 'intuitively attractive but slippery concept' (Francis, 1995 in Mitchell,
2002, p. 197), 'complex, multilayered and ... contested' (Freeman and Thompson-
Fawcett, 2003, p. 221 but also see Dixon and Fallon, 1989; MacDonald, 1999;
Prieus (2005, p. 5) in his study of 'sustainable housing' concludes that the concept
resembles that of the emperor's new clothes and that we should rather 'acknowledge
we do not know essential things about [it] than simply to 'believe' in it'. This
confusion and the difficulties it presents is evident in studies of urban practitioners'
attempts to understand and implement the concept of sustainability (see, for example,
Freeman's (2004) study of Dunedin, New Zealand and Dodson and Mees' (2003)
account of urban transport planning in Wellington, New Zealand).
Perhaps as a result of this uncertainty on the part of planners who are positioned to
take a more holistic view, much of the actual practice of a vastly curtailed version of
sustainability has been undertaken by those in the physical sciences, notably biology
and ecology. Various authors (Norgaard, 1994; Torgerson, 1995; Luke, 1995;
Godlovitch, 1998; Upham, 2000; Livingstone, 2005) have expressed concern about
the ways in which scientists are being asked to define and operationalise concepts like
sustainability when the process is 'fraught with danger because values, opinions and
social influences are an inextricable part of science' (Lele and Norgaard, 1996, p.
354).24 Though this makes terms like sustainable development and urban sustainablity
inescapably political (O'Riordan, 1988,2004; Richardson, 1997; Perkins and Thoms,
2000), this is not the prevalent view of scientific enterprise. More often science
24 From a different perspective Stigl (2003, p. 255) agrees that science is not value free, but argues that scientists should consciously engage in a 'proactive, heavily ethics- and wisdom-based "science for sustainability'" .
70
continues to be portrayed as disinterested, neutral and value free and this has some
subtle but very long-reaching consequences, as discussed in earlier chapters.
f !
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Chapter Four: Exploring the Urban
The subject of this thesis is the sustainability imperative and urban New Zealand, yet,
to date, I am guilty of neglecting this vital urban prefix. I am not alone in this
oversight; it is very common for the city to disappear from shOli definitions and more
lengthy accounts of urban sustainability. The following definition of a sustainable city
is fairly typical:
Sustainable cities are cities where socio-economic interests are brought together in harmony (co-evolution) with environmental and energy concems in order to ensure continuity in change (Nijkamp and Perrels, 1994, p.4).
The charge of neglect is perhaps a little unfair as it is already difficult enough to
accommodate the standard tripartite of economic, social and bio-physical
environmental cone ems in some acceptable and meaningful wai5. Yet urban
sustainability is a term that has seized the imagination of a range of planners,
politicians and certain sectors of the public and the concepts of the city and the urban
prefix deserves more attention. To this end, in this chapter I explore some of the more
common definitions of 'the urban' and address some of the theories surrounding
urban change. These definitions and explanations are then illustrated in a brief history
of urban development that begins with the religious city and ends with urban
sustainability.
Defining the Urban
It is common to hear references to sustainable cities that lack any in-depth analysis of
the urban component, yet one's theorisation of the city has important consequences
25 See, for example, Elkin and McLaren, 1991; Aasen, 1992; Haughton and Hunter, 1994; Mitlin and Satterthwaite, 1996; Hughes, 1999; Adger, Brown, Fairbrass, Jordan, Paavola, Rosendo and Seyfang, 2003.
72
for how sustainability is understood and implemented. A city conceptualised as a
complex ecosystem, for example, will receive vastly different treatment to the city
understood as the pinnacle of human civilisation and achievement. The widespread
neglect of this variance is interesting given the plethora of attributes particular to
cities that provide useful additions to the urban sustainability debate. To take just one
example, the contemporary planning obsession with compaction in the name ofbio
physical environmental sustainability has had wide-ranging, and sometimes traumatic
effects on populations who value low-density suburban living. Compaction can
increase dependency and demands on public services and infrastructure and result in
the proverbial concrete jungle that is not amenable to either wildlife or human
residents. Conversely, economies of scale associated with density can stimulate social
activity, lead to new forms ofleisure and employment opportunities, contain urban
sprawl and make optimal use of infrastructure. My point here is not to exhaust the
arguments for and against compaction so much as tie together very firmly issues
surrounding bio-physical environmental sustainability and urban attributes such as
propinquity, community, dependency, economies of scale and so on.
Underpinning these issues is the very way in which we conceptualise cities. Although
there is a degree of overlap, and the distinction oversimplifies a complex topic, we
can divide the definitions of cities into either spatial or evolutionary accounts. For my
research this categorisation is not just about academic tidiness, but is vitally important
in terms of its implications for how the city is both managed and experienced. As
Acselrad (2004, p.l) has pointed out 'Cities may be seen to be sustained as a material
structure, as the space of quality of life or as a political space where urban policies are
legitimised'. The salience of this distinction between spatial and evolutionary
73
accounts of the city is therefore thoroughly entwined with the concept of urban
sustainabilityand it is worthwhile exploring these ideas in more detail.
Spatial definitions of cities
Spatial accounts tend to treat the city as an object to be measured, compared,
manipulated, or administered from above. In general terms, the spatial city is
quantifiable and bound, subject to rational evaluation and control. One of the more
common spatial articulations of cities involves contrasting the urban with the rural as
outlined by Louis Wirth, for example, in his Urbanism as a Way of Life (1938). This
type of binary is often accompanied by figures and facts around population, acreage,
available resources, and so on. The city, and its various components and
characteristics are seen and treated as a discrete entity that can then be further
categorised and acted upon. In this tradition, Pacione (2001), for example, presents
four principles which can be used to identify urban places. The first is population size,
which is initially tempting for its simplicity, but quickly becomes complicated by the
actual number used to define 'urban' that varies from country to country. The second
is the economic base which can be used in conjunction with population size. He
presents the example ofIndia where 'urban' settlements are those with over 75 per
cent of the adult male population in non-agricultural work. The third involves
administrative or legal criteria. Most cities in the world are defined this way and
usually fall under the jurisdiction of the local authority. A problem with this principle
is that often the physical extent of the urban area exceeds the administrative boundary.
It is, for example, difficult to imagine a city that is not dependent to a significant
extent on its hinterland for waste disposal, food, energy and other resources, thus
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boundaries drawn around the city seem somewhat arbitrary.26 To account for this, the
fourth principle relates to the 'functional' urban region. In a further example of this
kind of categorisation dependent on a spatial account of cities, Savage and Warde
(1996) outline five urban types: world cities, global cities, new industrial districts,
declining industrial cities and socialist cities. They contend that such a schema is
responsive to the specificity of cities and the distinct roles they perform in the wider
world economy, though one might argue that the role of smaller urban areas, such as
Christchurch, are overlooked in their account.
Whilst these principles are somewhat useful in distinguishing urban from non-urban
areas, such singular definitions do little to capture the essence of urban living. As a
response, Pacione (2003, p. 20) noted that the city should also be understood in terms
of its qualities and advocated an understanding of both 'the city on the ground and the
city in the mind'. Such observations are consistent with spatial accounts of cities that
attend to the experiential aspects of urban life that depend on, for example,
propinquity and intensification. Lewis Mumford, for example, described the city as a
'geographic plexus' - 'an economic organisation, an institutional process, a theatre of
social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity' ([1937], 1996, p.185). For
Mumford, urban areas had distinct characteristics based on social exchanges
intensified in the city as nowhere else. As cities became larger and spread over greater
geographical areas, the more 'anonymous' ~ocial interactions became. The
consequences of this dispersed urban form and resultant anonymity was the
'inevitable dissipation of its humanity and creativity' because 'urban associations [or]
social relations [are] made through proximity and distance, closeness and remoteness'
26 This is particularly relevant to Christchurch which, it has been noted, catches a cold every time a Cantabrian fanner sneezes.
75
(Pile, 1999, pp.l6-17, 18). Thus Mumford was a proponent ofthe city as an
intensification of humanity and the contribution he thought this made to the ever-
changing human personality. The suburbs, in contrast, he described as 'a collective
attempt to lead a private life' (in Knox, 1995, p. 208).27
Another established feature ofthis debate pertains to the ways in which urban society
often functions in terms of personal interaction. Tonnies (1887) made an important
contribution to this discussion based on his distinction between gemeinschaft and
gesellschaft types of social interaction and organisation. The former generally
involves face-to-face interaction and is associated with 'community
relationships ... bounded by local territory [and] based on close contact and emotional
ties' (Valentine, 2001, p.l15). This type of social organisation was typical of the
small villages prevalent before the Industrial Revolution and, it may be argued, still
characterises many of New Zealand's regional towns today. With industrialisation
came massive urban migration and a new form of social interaction and organisation -
gesellschaft - based on individualism and more impersonal, contractual ties. An
example of this type of relationship in the context of urban design and governance is
the 'body corporate', the formal agreement used in many apartment complexes which
regulate the painting and maintenance of outdoor areas, placement of television
aerials and the like. These 'community of interest developments' or 'privatopias'
27 Weber (1963) made a significant contribution to a tangential debate which centres on the idea of community without propinquity and vice versa. Our contemporary concept of urban relations is no longer necessarily predicated on geographically bound space, as would have been the case in preindustrial society. Some obvious examples of this include the geographically dispersed, but often emotionally close, chat groups and bloggers that have become a popular feature of the internet, or the associations based on professional identities rather than one's neighbourhood, town or even one's country (also see Savage and Warde, 1993; Valentine, 2001).
76
(Hayden, 200428) often rely on legally binding covenants or conditions, and are
characteristic of many of Christchurch's newer gated and semi-gated subdivisions
(see Dixon, Dupuis and Lysnar (2004) and Dupuis and Thoms (2004) for a discussion
of gated communities in New Zealand). In an intriguing paradox, recent planning
movements, such as Traditional Neighbourhood Design (TND) and New Urbanism,
explicitly focus on recapturing gemeinschaft through both the manipulation of the
built form and legal covenants and contracts, though the role ofthe latter in these
creations has, with few exceptions (Winstanly, Thoms and Perkins, 2003), been
neglected by researchers.
Evolutionary accounts of cities
The Modem City
Although the gemeinschaftlgesellschaft distinction is based to a certain extent on
spatial relations, significantly, it is also evolutionary in that gesellschaft communities
are seen to be an expression of the modern condition. This position has also been
adopted or discussed by the likes of Georg Simmel, Savage and Warde, (1993, 1996)
and Allen (2000). As outlined by the Chicago School in what I call 'classic urban
ecology', for example, industrial capitalism has produced cities that exemplify the
new economic and social orders which emphasise the division oflabour. In this view,
cities can be regarded as centres of commerce, production and specialised economic
activities (Savage and Warde, 1996) and this has had an impact on the ways in which
social relations in the modem city are portrayed. Harvey (2003, p. 939), for example,
clliims that 'calmness and civility in urban history are the exception not the rule' and
28 In A Field Guide to Spra1V1 Hayden provides an interesting array of labels for the phenomena associated with urban expansion, including 'zoomburbs' which grow even faster than 'boomburbs', 'clustered worlds' and 'category killers'.
77
modem urbanism is often depicted as characterised by anomie and misanthropy.
Thrift questions this view of the city, however. Though we might characterise modem
urbanism as living in a 'continual state of radical insecurity mid dread' Thrift argues
that this is because we often confuse sociality with liking (2005, p. 135). Rather, a
component of sociality is being civil even when we do not like the others with whom
we must interact. Such behaviour forms part of the 'hum' of maintenance and repair
functions of cities that are actually 'so familiar we tend to overlook them' (Thrift,
2005, p. 136).
Marxist urban theory presents cities as 'capitalist mechanisms operating to create the
geography of economic life'. In this model, capitalist accumulation, competition,
exploitation and restructuring are of primary concern rather than industrialisation.
Savage and Warde (1996) note that Marxist models, like the one outlined here, can be
dismissive of the history of the area and that there is little room for human agency in
urban development. Likewise, Molotch (1976) and Logan and Molotch (1996)
actually highlight the role of human agency in urban change, arguing that pro-growth
coalitions explicitly manipulate the built form of the city to increase their profitability
and maximise their interests. Harvey's (1986) theory of urban change addresses links
between the movement of capital and urban form. He noted that while land is a
commodity in that it can be bought and sold, it has additional characteristics that
make it different, such as the fact that it is permanent and fixed in place, that it is
necessary to human life, and it can act as a storing place for other assets. His model
highlights the links between urban and economic restructuring using the concepts of
primary circuits (when things are produced), secondary circuits (when capital moves
to invest in the built environment) and tertiary circuits (scientific knowledge). Harvey
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explains the growth of North American suburbs in terms ofthe movement of
investments from the primary to secondary circuits. Tertiary circuits based on
scientific knowledge and technology are then employed as buildings become outdated
and less efficient. Savage and Warde (1996) commend this model because a number
of urban processes can be explained and it can also accommodate social and political
individuals and groups who can act upon and alter the urban environment. It also
allows for historical specificity.
The Postmodern City
The modem rational-economic model of cities has, like many other pursuits, been
postmodernised if only by the debate surrounding what that might actually mean.
Noble's (2000) overview of this literature points toward considerable disagreement as
to whether we live in a new and postmodern (or post-modem) society, or if modernity
has not simply been extended or become more 'reflexive' (Giddens, 1984). It is
possible that recent social change is simply a new phase in the continual cultural
development of capitalism, yet a number of commentators note a number of
significant transformations. Baudrillard (1981 [2003], 1998), for example, made a
case that everyday life experience is fundamentally different to that of the past
because of the domination of the image and the sign associated with processes of
commodification. Practices of consumption have also changed in the postmodern city,
helping us to construct our identities and that of others. Advertising plays a central
role in this process. Strinati (1995, in Miles 2001) pointed out that modem advertising
informed consumers of the product's qualities or functions in persuasive ways, but
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postmodem advertising emphasises stylistic aspects and has become something of a
parody of itself.
This tendency is now evident in the promotion of, for example, many of the newer
residential subdivisions, and this advertising is central to the construction of the
identity of the development itself and that of its incoming residents. Yet there is a
physical fonn attached to this advertising and, in tum, this naturalises (Zukin, 1999),
and acts upon, residents' spatial practice which then infonns new representations of
space and representational space (Lefebvre, 1991). The resultant socia-spatial
dialectic (Soja, 1999,2000; Knox and Pinch, 2000) challenged 'crudely dichotomous
understandings of the connection between society and space' and resisted the 'spatial
fetishism' that posited relations between groups and classes as relations between
places, epitomised in tenns like 'inner city areas' (Collinge, 2005, p. 191). In contrast,
this position has been criticised as either overly-reliant on the social, or, more
recently, as dependent on a non-existent duality. As Derrida stated, the space/society
binary is a 'crisis of versus' (1981, in Collinge, 2005, p. 192). The deconstructivist
position is relational, positing that the comprehension of each concept depends on an
understanding of the other. Similar arguments have been adopted for the
nature/culture, body/mind and space/time dualisms.
Escaping simplistic binaries was one of Lefebvre's achievements and many scholars,
particularly neo-Marxists, are intrigued by his version of urbanity outlined in the
Production a/Space (1991) discussed earlier. Lefebvre's political economy depicts
the city as actively produced by urban practitioners seeking to 'siphon offloose
money set on speculation in real estate and financial assets' into secondary circuits
80
which are 'liquid loot yearning to become concrete in space' (Merrifield, 2005, p.
694). Space is not simply objectively fixed, but is replete with, imbued in and of
competing representations. Lefebvre's work has been extremely influential with a
number of scholars adopting his ideas for various ends (Desfor and Keil, 2004;
Vallance, Perkins and Moore, 2005).
Soja, a proponent of Lefebvrian thought, has used his framework to explain what he
calls the Postmetropolis (1996, 2000). Following Lefebve, he argued that all social
relations, from the family to the state, 'remain abstract and ungrounded until they are
specifically spatialised, made into material and symbolic power relations' (2000, p.9).
The urban accentuates the 'movements and change, tensions and conflict, politics and
ideology, passions and desires' that make this process more than a simple matter of
fixing social relations to physical space. He thus distinguishes between 'Firstspace'
which can be perceived in physical and measurable ways; 'Secondspace', which
relates to conceptual spaces of imagery and symbolism; and 'Thirdspace', which
forms the core of his links to urbanism. It is in Thirdspace that the dynamic elements
ofthe city reign, a dynamism he links explicitly to 'synoecism' or 'synekism' which
Soja takes to mean a condition 'arising from dwelling together in one house' (2000, p.
12). The ancient Greeks used this term to identify the condition that arose from the
union of smaller settlements under the domain of a single city-state, thereby making
the term intrinsically urban in nature. It is a characteristic of urbanity that Soja
presents as a challenge to the more orthodox view of a city as 'an outcome or product
of explicitly social action and intention' . Instead, he argues, dynamic cityspace should
be recognised as a 'source of explanation in itself and Soja favours an alternative
reading of urban history whereby the characteristic of 'cityness' is emphasised in both
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the manifestation and survival of cities. Soja is under no illusion that the economies of
cities are an important part of their ability to endure and flourish. His thesis - that
'cityness' was a condition of urban areas rather than a simple result rests on this
concept of synoecism which, he argues, connotes 'the economic and ecological
interdependencies and the creative - as well as occasionally destructive - synergisms
that arise from the purposeful clustering and collective habitation of people in space,
in a 'home' habitat' (2000, p. 12). Soja's contention that cityspace is lived space,
simultaneously 'real and imagined, actual and virtual' has some clear similarities with
recent literature examining neo-organicist cities, hybridity and cyborgs (Gandy, 2005;
Marvin and Medd, 2006). In this light, it is worth reiterating Gandy's point that we
need to pay attention to these virtual and/or imagined spaces as they do not simply
reflect social realities but help to generate them.
A Compact History of Urban Development
As both Nietzsche and Foucault have made us aware, historical analyses are not so
much objective as biased, often heavily in favour ofthe victor. Chronological
approaches based on archaeological records are not necessarily the best way of
exploring the past either. A good example of this is Ferdinadez-Armesto's (2001)
Civilizations where chronology is abandoned altogether in favour of a schema based
on the various peoples' relationships with their environments. Yet, these caveats
aside, it is important to trace some of the ideas pertinent to urban development and
change as they have been outlined to us throughout the ages. The point I would like to
make in the following pages is that urban form and urban life have responded to
various compulsions over the millennia, with 'sustainability' being just one in a long
series of rationalities.
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Early cities
The [city] state came about as a means of securing life itself. It continues in being to secure the good life (Aristotle, The Politics, trans 1962, p. 59).
There are essentially five explanations regarding the origins of cities. Carier (1983,
pp.1-7) discusses four of the more orthodox accounts. The first involves the idea of an
agricultural surplus which, it is argued, allowed for the specialisation oflabour - one
of the requisites of the city - to develop. From this follows both social stratification
and 'the detachment of specialist from tribe and kin' which makes residence the
urban qualification as opposed to kinship affiliation. The second explanation, the
economic theory, presents the city as a product of meeting points on long distance
trade routes and/or regional exchange. Those in favour of this theory point out that
the Egyptian hieroglyph for a town was a cross within a circle which symbolised the
two functions of routes to the market and defensive walls. The third explanation, the
'religious' theory, posits the city as evolving due to the respect for authority and
attachment to a certain location. This form of social organisation could only be
possible in the presence of some organising principle and power structures commonly
part of religious doctrine. Religion was able to provide social solidarity that was not
necessarily based on kinship ties but resided in the hands of priests who administered
a particular territory. Adding weight to this explanation is the prevalence of religious
artefacts generally found during the excavation of old city sites. Finally, 'militaristic'
theory posits the city as developing out of simple, fortified strongholds which later
grew into cities due to a combination of the other accounts outlined here.
Carter's view (1983, p. 35), which is similar to Pacione's (2001), is that although
cities may originally have been 'passive' Roman Castra, fortified residences or
83
ecclesiastical structures, they would have remained isolated fortresses without 'active'
processes of trade and commerce. Pacione (2001) might add that the emergence of
cities could equate to an urban transformation which involved a plethora of factors
over long periods of time. The fifth, and less orthodox view, explicitly focuses on this
active content. The chief proponent is Soja who, as discussed earlier, argued that the
manifestation and survival of urban areas was stimulated by, rather than the result of,
the characteristics of' cityness' and synekism. Without the synergisms of purposeful
clustering agricultural surplus, military competitiveness or religiosity would not have
been possible.
Whilst the role of synekism is moot, less contentious are claims about the size of
some ofthe early cities. By 3000 BC, the population of Memphis is estimated to have
been 40000 and evidence has been found to suggest reasonably complex banking
systems and establishment of organised usury which has had such a profound effect
on our current methods of calculating economic growth. By 2000 BC cities of over
100 000 had appeared, such as Lagash (the Babylonian capital), Babylon itself and
Nineveh. Rome had a population of approximately 500 000 by 1 AD and Chaugan
(China) was the first to reach 1 million soon after. Baghdad replaced Chaugan as the
largest city in about 1000 AD. These cities were active both economically and
culturally.
The Religious City
The factors that have influenced both the choice of the site of cities and its layout
have changed over time in accordance with the beliefs and perceived needs of the
day. Some of the earliest cities, for example, are believed to have been laid out in
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such a way as to incur favour from the celestial rulers. As one example of this,
Coedes (1963 in Carter, 1983) described Angkor in Cambodia thus: 'The smaller
world, the city of Angkor, and through its means the whole Kluner empire were put
under the 'Lord of the Universe' and so the city was organised to align with the
cosmic structures which dominated and informed their world. Urban form therefore
responded to the dictates of a religious rationality.
Figure 3: The City of Angkor
Consecrated to the Hindu God Vishnu, Angkor Thom, the 3km2 walled and moated royal city, was built in the 12th century. The main temple, Bayon, lies at the centre of the city, and aligns with the vertical axis of the central spire that is the link between heaven and Earth. The city has four entrances that correspond to the cardinal points, and a fifth called the Victory Gate (www.canbypublications.com/maps/templemap). The architecture surrounding the temple mirrors Hindu cosmology as described in the Rigveda. By the time construction was finished the Khmer civilization believed that the king would, upon death, become a god and reside as Vishnu at Angkor Wat (www.planetquest.orgllearnlangkor.htrnl).
85
The Regulated City
While the locations of the early Roman cities, including Rome itself, were chosen
according to ritual procedures derived from myth and religion, later cities were built
according to definite plans that celebrated order and convenience and which often
resembled a military encampment for security. Two main streets - one running east
west and the other running north-south - were surrounded by a grid of smaller streets,
the layout of which can be attributed to the ancient Greek plmmer Hippodamus.
Marcus Vitruvius, the famous Roman architect, modified this fonn of urban planning
in favour of a radial pattern which facilitated the movement of goods and people to
and from the city centre. It also allowed for shelter from prevailing winds and
facilitated more salubrious conditions for the townsfolk in the fonn of baths and
infrastructure for the removal of waste. Though it was acknowledged that invaders
could navigate the grid layout relatively easily, in the glory days ofthe Roman
Empire, military defence of the city was less important than keeping the citizenry
content. Urban fonn was therefore responsive to a rationality concerned with
satisfying 'civilised' ideals.
Figure 4: The Rise of the Grid - Vitruvian Radial Plan
(greekworks. coml contentlindex. php/web 10 gI ex tendedlreevaluating_ the _gri d)
86
The Medieval City
Defence and security arrangements changed dramatically with the advent of
gunpowder and the canon. The latter made the grid a much less defensible urban form
as it was vulnerable to such long-range, straight-shooting weaponry. As a result,
household or compound defensive strategies became more common and cities like
Florence, Italy are good examples of how this altered the city' s form from a grid-like
pattern to a city of dead-ends, blind alleys and enclaves. Many medieval towns are
thus a labyrinth of twisting, small streets that confuse the invader (and, more recently,
the tourist) and compromise the efficacy of long-range weapons but which are still
legible and easily navigated by locals who have grown up there. Neither convenience,
sanitation nor access to the centre were of primary importance.
Figure 5: Florence - The Labyrinthine Medieval City
(Jacobs, 1993, p. 220)
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The Mercantile Capitalist City and the Return of the Grid
The grid experienced a comeback during the Renaissance and Baroque periods,
though the main streets tended to be wider and grander and often celebratory in
character. The emergence of private rooms in houses was balanced against the pomp
and splendour of public spaces. The grid was also to prove a very popular export to
the New World and many colonial cities are based on this pattern, not least because it
facili tates easy land speculation and development. As Carter (1983) pointed out, the
rationality behind the popularity of the grid was that it provided the 'cheapest and
most rapid way of exploiting urban land' and in the United States the 1785 Land
Ordinance system, which applied to all public land, ensured that it was subdivided
into a series of towns which were to measure exactly 6 miles by 6.
Figure 6: San Francisco - The Return of the Grid?
(Jacobs, 1993,p.242)
Many New Zealand cities and towns, including Christchurch, exemplify this approach
to urban planning despite geographic realities, such as rivers and mountains, that
88
challenge the wisdom of adhering to such methods. Although the grid suffered a loss
of popularity in the 1940s, particularly in the United States, it has experienced a semi-
renaissance owing to proponents of New Urbanism and Traditional Neighbourhood
Design who laud its legibility, walkablity and traffic dispersal properties (Calthorpe
and Fulton, 2001; Grammenos and Pollard, 2005). The physical layout of the city is
also explicitly tied to social concerns, such as creating a sense of community, and
these aspirations have countered rigid adherence to the grid in many cases. The most
famous example of this type of planning is Seaside, Florida which was one of the
locations used dUl1ng filming of The Truman Show where the star, Jim Carrey, plays a
man who discovers his life is actually a television show.
Industrial cities
The great cities of the earth ... have become .. .loathsome centres of fornication and covetousness - the smoke of their sin going up into the face of heaven like the furnace of Sodom; and the pollution of it rotting and raging in the bones and souls of the peasant people round them, as if they were each a volcano whose ashes broke out in blains upon man and beast (John Ruskin, Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's Prayer and the Church, 1880, in Hall, 2002, p. 13).
Ruskin's view of cities is clearly in stark contrast to that of Aristotle who saw the city
as the very means of securing a good life, yet there were some very compelling
reasons driving this emergent understanding of the cities as loathsome. Sherlock
(1991) outlines the transition from pre-industrial to industrial cities as including a
number of stages and conditions associated with manufacturing. The 'household
system' describes the earliest forms of manufacturing where articles were made in the
home and were used primarily by the family or local community. This developed into
89
the 'guild system' where craftsmen moved beyond being part-time farm labourers and
worked exclusively at their speciality. This change was accompanied by a move to
the towns. By end of the 16th century, the guilds had become powerful enough to
concern the ruling elites and their work was moved out of towns back to less
important rural areas. Guilds were thus replaced by the' domestic system' which
marked an important stage of capitalism because it was no longer the cottager buying
the raw materials and selling the finished product but the town-based entrepreneur.
Important among these were the entrepreneurs involved in the wool trade who
generally owned the looms and charged for their hire. Eventually this system was
succeeded by the 'factory system' which accompanied the development of power
from water and steam. Most artisans moved to the factories and this led to
concentration of labour in small communities around fast flowing rivers. At the same
time, Tudor sheep farmers 'by fair means or foul' appropriated open fields and
commons and freed serfs were gradually forced off their land which was becoming
more enclosed by hedgerows. This led to the breaking up of feudal communities
where everyone had a right to use land even if they didn't own it and it also helped
the wool trade prosper.
Agricultural productivity increased with new farming methods and machinery, but
rural labour became cheaper and rural life harder. The advent of coal as a power
source for iron making had the double consequence of favouring coal mines for the
location of new towns, and with cheaper iron products, machinery became available
for mass production. Sherlock (1991, p. 64) noted that the rail boom ofthe 1830s and
40s was mostly concerned with the transport of coal but it did stamp the seal on the
process of urbanisation in England. The Industrial Revolution brought an end to the
90
leisured elite's rule as they were gradually replaced by a class whose power came
from industry rather than land. This new elite set out to create wealth 'regardless of
the cost in human tenns' (ibid, p.67). They obtained moral support from the Whig
refonners (who were enthusiastic about destroying the land owning Tory
conservatives), who went along with the theories expounded in Adam Smith's (1776)
Wealth o/Nations where the State's interference in commerce was seen as a
hindrance to the creation of wealth. For those advocating laissez-faire policies, even
the most worthy protectionist motives were the antithesis of free trade and national
prosperity.
The unbridled pursuit of wealth and the lack of any effective regulatory environment
to preserve the amenities of cities had some rather ugly consequences for the rapidly
growing number of urban inhabitants. Manchester is a good example of how just how
quickly some of the new industrial towns were growing. According to Sherlock
(1991), in 1744 Manchester's population was 24 000, but by 1801 (27 years later) it
had trebled to 70 000. Such rapid urbanisation had dreadful consequences. Laurence
(1999, p.296) reports that in Manchester in the 1840s, the average age at death for a
male labourer was a mere 17 years. In comparison, a rural labourer's life expectancy
was 38 years. Similar differences were seen between the urban and rural gentry whose
life expectancy was 38 years and 52 years respectively. There was little improvement
over the next forty years. The Fabian Society's (1887) Facts/or Socialists infonned
the populace that in London, 'one person in every five will die in the workhouse,
hospital or lunatic asylum'.
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London, although epitomising many of the urban problems, was not alone in
experiencing them. In 1891, Parisians were living at urban densities twice that of
London, and many of Berlin's poor were housed in soldiers' barracks akin to those
built by Frederick the Great at densities 7 times29 that of London (Hall, 2002). In both
London and Berlin, there were growing fears that city dwellers were becoming
mentally unstable with die Angst vor der Stadt expressing the fear of 'social
decomposition, suggested by evidence of suicide, alcoholism, and venereal disease,
excessive rationality and a lack of political stability' (ibid, p. 35). In the United States,
the American Journal o/Sociology, 1897, acknowledged the widely held belief that
'large cities ... are great centres of social corruption and degeneration' (in Hall, 2002,
p. 37). It was becoming evident to all who lived there, that the cities of the Industrial
Revolution were often unsavoury at best, lethal at worst.
In stark contrast to the pre-industrial cities which had been seen as 'centres of art and
culture, of all that was good in civilisation' (Ferguson, 1994, p.25) the conditions of
the industrialised city gave rise to the Romantic movement in literature and the arts.
Though the condition of the working poor and impoverished was arguably most dire
in English cities, a corresponding disenchantment with urban life was evident in
North America as well. As White and White (1962, p.2) pointed out, though a select
few spoke out in favour of the city (they cite Walt Whitman and William James) 'the
volume of their voices did not compare with the anti-urban roar produced in the
national literary pantheon by Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville,
Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, and William Dean Howells'. Furthermore, they
warn, those who today 'express tender concern' for the city's future should recognise
29 This was calculated using data cited in Hall, 2003: 33.
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the strong anti-urbanist sentiment pervading American history. For much of both
North America and Great Britain's recent past, those who could 'abandoned the city
as the centre of human endeavour and turned instead to the worship of nature'
(Ferguson, 1994, p.25). Short (1991, p. 73) suggested that the ability to buy a rural
piece ofland was of 'respectability, taste and decorum' and, furthermore, the 'socially
sanctioned method of conspicuous consumption'. This trend for wealthy urbanites to
move to the county was found throughout much of Europe. Sherlock (1991) describes
how, from 1820-1840, there was a housing boom to accommodate the wealthy in
areas a carriage ride away from the city. With the development of rail in the 1860s,
the affluent began to move even further out to the 'real' country. Urban areas
themselves began to expand due to the advent of rail, electric tram and in some cities,
underground transport systems. These years therefore represent something of an
inversion of the natural order where the power elite - the traditional inhabitants of the
city centre - left for greener pastures. The suburbs, which until that time had been the
realm of the poor and the powerless, became prime real estate.
In England, the conditions of the urban started to receive attention in the mid-1800s
and in 1848 the first Public Health Act was passed which gave local authorities new
responsibilities. Despite this, mortality rates due to disease remained high and typhus,
small pox and cholera were not effectively brought under control until 1875 when
local governments were required to build proper sewers. It was against this backdrop
of urban misery that town planning with a social focus evolved and Hall reminds us
that although it is 'numbingly unoriginal', it is also vital to bear in mind that
twentieth-century planning movements were, in essence, a 'reaction to the evils of the
nineteenth century city' (Hall, 2002, p. 7).
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Thus Howard's conceptualisation of the 'Garden City' (developed in the years from
1880-98) and the derivatives conceived by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker in
Britain and Henry Wright in the United States can only be understood in this context.
This first theme in plmming symbolises not so much the advent of town planning,
which already had an established history, but rather the birth of modem planning
because it had a social purpose (Hall, 2002). Howard was very much concerned to
alleviate the abysmal conditions of cities but he also wanted to address a depopulating
countryside. Howard's solution was 'central urban renewal at lower densities,
accompanied by new garden cities and garden suburbs on green fields' which were to
be built by 'public agencies' and serviced by 'new technologies of electric power and
low cost public transport' (Hall, 2002). This ideal had to compete with a number of
other trends in planning that emerged during this time. Patrick Geddes and his
American counterparts Lewis Mumford and Frank Lloyd Wright developed a second
strand, which was also directed at over-crowding and its ill-effects. In contrast stands
the 'monumental movement' which, though full of pomp and splendour, was devoid
of any social objective. Finally, the particular brand of urban intensification proposed
by Le Corbusier represents a fourth approach to urban planning (Hall, 2002, p. 8-9).
Despite the substantial differences between these planning ideals, perhaps the most
crucial debate of this time pertained to the role of the state. The political fault line lay
between those who were avidly against any state intervention, which was seen as
inimical to the creation of wealth, and those who believed more regulation was
required in order to redress the plight ofthe urban poor. Planning, in this context,
clearly represented a form of political orientation and spoke of one's belief in the
94
rightful activities and methods of state enterprise. Although other matters of welfare
worked out somewhat differently, housing received special attention within the
framework of a debate which raged between those who maintained the poor had been
reduced to a state of utter apathy and those who were convinced London to be on the
verge of a socialist revolution. Adequate housing was seen as the antidote to a
socialist catastrophe and those holding this conviction allied with others who had long
maintained the urban workforce deserved a decent place to live. Housing thus became
a pivotal point around which the growing social movement came to tum.
Although building regulations had been passed for drainage, ventilation, thickness of
walls and space at the rear of buildings in 1875 (Sherlock, 1991, pp. 78-80), in the
United Kingdom, the role of housing in achieving social goals can be attributed to the
1885 and 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Acts, the latter of which made
provision for the 'redevelopment' oflarge areas of the city in order to build working
class lodging houses. This allowed 'progressive local authorities to take control'
(Sherlock, 1991, p.32), but the result was often more devastating than the original
problem. Freeman (in Girardet, 1996, p. 80) noted that while 'slum clearance' was a
. powerful slogan used to justify the removal of old housing estates, it ignored the fact
that the majority of the social problems found in such places were not a direct
consequence of the built environment. Hall (2002, p. 46) argued that although the
loathing and fear of cities was often distorted and sometimes exaggerated, 'the reali,ty
was horrific enough, and it stemmed from poverty'.
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Modern cities
The problems of rapid, unplanned growth provided impetus for an urban planning
movement based on rationality and efficiency (Troy, 2000). Newman (1997, p. 14)
described the modem city as an 'expression of the industrial revolution' which was
based on a formulaic or 'scientific' approach to town planning with predetermined
plot ratios, setbacks, proportions of open space and standardised roads and housing.
According to Wagner, a German planner in the early 1900s, districts with 10 000
inhabitants should have' 13 hectares of woods, 2.4 hectares of playing fields, 1.6
hectares of sports grounds, and 0.5 hectares of walkways' (Van Rooijen, 2000, p.
221). Newman relates how 'each new suburb was rolled out as though it came from a
factory' with little thought given to either human creativity of the local bio-physical
environment. He points out that neither creativity nor the bio-physical environment
can be mechanised without losing their essential character and they therefore
represent a core part of the critique of modernist planning with its standardisation and
formulae.
But beyond the good intentions of any single planner, or even planning philosophy,
were forces acting on the form of cities all over the world. 'Advances' in
transportation and cheaper mortgages driving change in real estate meant that unless
constrained by geographical features, many cities began to spread and decentralise.
The response in Britain was the Housing and Town Planning Bill of 1909 which
aimed to:
Provide a domestic condition for the people in which their physical health, their morals, their character, and their whole social condition can be improved ... The Bill aims in broad outlines at, and hopes to secure, the home health, the house
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beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified, and the suburb salubrious (John Bums, 1908, in Hall, 2002, p. 54).
Housing, and its role in society can also be regarded as a point of difference between
Europe and Amelica. Hall (2002) argued that in early twentieth century Amelica,
there fonned an alliance between real estate interests and middle-income home-
owners who had no interest in housing programmes for the poor. In the United States,
the Gennan planning control mechanism of zoning was adopted with the first zoning
ordinance passed in 1916 in New York. Zoning is based on the principles that 'like
activities' should be placed together, and that residential and industrial areas should
be separated (Gottdiener, 1994, p. 298). Zoning policy rests in the hands of
municipalities and townships and it controls the height, bulk, and area of buildings
(Pacione, 2001). Although ostensibly designed to regulate shading, fire danger,
congestion and assist with the provision of services, critics of zoning point out that
regulation of minimum site size, floor coverage, minimum number of bedrooms and a
requirement that the house be detached can all equate to a very effective way of
excluding particular social groups from a given area (Pacione, 2001). Hall (2002: 62,
citing Walker, 1960) describes zoning as a 'static process of attempting to set and
preserve the character of certain neighbourhoods, in order to preserve property values
in these areas, while imposing only nominal restrictions on those areas holding a
promise of speculative profit'. Zoning used thus was the antithesis of social justice.
In Europe, however, a strong 'working class consciousness was allied with an
interventionist bureaucracy' (Hall, 2002, p. 42) and the attitude to housing therefore
differed markedly on the other side of the Atlantic. These differences were
97
exaggerated by the aspiration of the post- World War I government to provide those
who had fought for Home and Country with homes worth fighting for. Fischler (2000)
maintained that prior to the Great War an adequate standard of living was an integral
part of a reformist discourse expressed as both an economic possibility and political
necessity. In post war fervour, however, providing decent living standards became a
sacred duty, 'a debt to the dead which must be paid to the living, in tenns of health
and life and opportunity' (Rowntree, 1919, in Fischler, 2000, p. 144). This movement
gained legitimacy through claims that a certain standard ofliving was necessary in
order that a state call itself 'civilised'. The following quotation from A.C. Pigou
(1914, in Fischler, 2000, p. 142) is a good example ofthis conviction with regards to
the State:
It is the duty of a civilised state to lay down certain minimum conditions in every department of life, below which it refuses to allow any of its free citizens to fall. There must be a minimum standard of conditions in factories, a minimum standard of ... leisure, a minimum standard of dwelling accommodation, a minimum standard of education, of medical treatment ... and of wholesome food and clothing. The standards must all be upheld ... and any man or family which fails to attain independently anyone of them must be regarded as proper subject for State action (1914, p. 36).
As a result, between the first and second World Wars, more than one million local
authority houses were built and most ofthese were single-family cottage style
dwellings with a garden, located at the urban periphery of major cities (Hall, 2002).
They reflected many of Robert Unwin's ideas, such as a minimum distance of70 feet
between houses to ensure sunshine in the winter and an emphasis on cul-de-sac
layouts. When combined with the new means of transportation, this kind of
development inevitably began to encroach upon the countryside and while it might be
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argued that this was a waste of good agricultural land, the following quotation
illustrates the social concerns that were also mooted at the time:
And then there are the hordes of hikers cackling insanely in the woods, or singing raucous songs as they walk arm in arm at midnight down the quiet village street. ... There are fat girls in shorts, youths in gaudy ties and plus-fours, and a roadhouse round every comer and a cafe on top of every hill for their accommodation (load, 1938, in Hall, 2002, p. 84).
Bruegrnann (2000) stated that the real 'countryman' would obviously have very clear
ideas about what would be the appropriate kind of building for the countryside. For
the landed gentry, rural development would involve a great country house with an
associated agricultural village. From this perspective, 'the strivings of the middle
classes to obtain for themselves what had been the privilege of the landed gentry
could only result in disorder and ugliness'. This conviction was based on more than
aesthetics; 'It was deeply rooted in very basic notions about the nature of the natural
social order' (Bruegrnann, 2000, p. 161).
It was during the post-World War I years that the ideas of Patrick Geddes gathered
strength. This famous figure in urban planning is most notable for his development of
regional planning which entailed a survey of the resources available in a natural
region and, importantly, of the human responses to it. This concept resounds today
and Hall (2002, p. 149) has described it as the 'aphorism' of planning gospel 'Survey
before Plan'. Although this elevated the role of geography, according to Geddes the
process of surveying should also include an evaluation of traditional occupations and
historic links to places so as to gain an understanding of the 'active experienced
environment' (Weaver, 1984, in Hall, 2002, p. 149). According to Hall (2002), the
ideas of Geddes and Howard are closely linked, but different, in the sense that
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Geddes' ideas applied to the region rather than the city. Both were keen to ensure that
if the people could not go to the country then the country should come to the town.
Geddes' meeting with Lewis Mumford in 1923 resulted in these ideas being conveyed
across the Atlantic and made a strong impact on the Regional Planning Association of
America (Hall, 2002). In these times, the private motorcar was seen as providing the
means whereby the populace could take advantage of rural and semi-rural living.
Electricity and transportation efficiencies also enabled industry to leave the congested
city. As Mumford, who called Geddes 'master', (1925 in Hall, 2002, p. 161) wrote:
Regional planning asks not how wide an area can be brought under the aegis of the metropolis, but how the population and civic facilities can be distributed so as to promote and stimulate a vivid, creative life throughout the whole region ... The regionalist attempts to plan an area so that all its sites and resources, from forest to city, from highland to water level, may be soundly developed, and so that the population will be distributed so as to utilise, rather than to nullify or destroy, its natural advantages. It sees people, industry and land as a single unit [and cities were to] represent fuller development of the more humane arts and sciences.
Sub-urban and rural living was unexpectedly popular and the problems associated
with urban sprawl became more apparent and more pressing in both Britain and the
United States. As Roseland (1998, pp.15-16) noted, most North American cities were
built:
using technologies that assumed abundant and cheap energy and land would be available forever. Cheap energy influenced the construction of our spacious homes and buildings, fostered our addiction to the automobile, and increased the separation of our workplaces from our homes. Urban sprawl is one legacy of abundant fossil fuel and our perceived right to unrestricted use of the private car whatever the social costs and externalities.
The Broadacre Cities of Frank Lloyd Wright reflect this faith in the abundance of
resources, but, importantly, his ideas also demonstrated a wariness of relying overly
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on industry and factory jobs in the wake ofthe Depression of the 1930s. In his ideal
world, everyone could be fanner and artist on his acre of land which was considered
enough to be self-sufficient. Although the Broadacre concept was criticised at the
time for making family units live in isolation, the general populace enthusiastically
received the diluted version of suburban living on a qumier acre.
In England too, suburban living proved popular. Blowers and Young (2000, p. 92)
describe the post- World War II era of British history as 'the apotheosis of state
intervention in the creation of the welfare state' which they attribute to the 1945
Labour government. The 'compulsory collectivism' necessitated by the war fostered a
sense of community and common cause which expressed itself in 'a generous social
refonn and reconstruction programme in health, housing and welfare'. These
activities recast planning which was 'elevated to one of the central planks of social
reconstruction' (Freestone, 2000, p. 3). The demand for low-density living had a
noticeable impact on the surrounding agricultural areas and various methods of
controlling sprawl were attempted. One of the most enduring was the British 1947
Town and Country Planning Act which was designed to shape both the city and the
countryside. The Act also tried to find some equilibrium between private land
ownership and public accountability by making all land development subject to
pennission from the local planning authority. Its goals included protecting the
countryside from urban sprawl and the creation of New Towns. These planned new
towns surrounded by greenbelts paid lip service to the ideas of Ebenezer Howard but
were never the social experiment in communal living he envisaged. The greenbelt,
however, became a central part of modem planning orthodoxy and sparked a
perpetual debate between real estate developers and planners. An unintended effect of
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both urban containment and advances in motoring technology was a plethora of 'leap
frog' towns which essentially form commuter villages beyond the greenbelt (Pacione,
2001).
During the 1960s, attention shifted to the redevelopment of existing areas. One of the
more infamous means by which this redevelopment occurred involved the building of
tower blocks or high-rises. These started appearing in the wake of World War II in
response to the increased demand for urban housing and were somewhat reminiscent
of Le Corbusier's grand housing visions. These were especially popular in the Eastern
Bloc countries where such housing was seen as providing the ideal foundation for
communal living (Girardet, 1996). But they were ugly, difficult to live in, and, as
demonstrated by the collapse of Ronan Point in London in 1968, sometimes
structurally unsound. According to Girardet, a number of British studies also found
that 'psychoneurotic disorders' were three times more common among those living in
multi-storey dwellings than among those living in low-level detached homes. Within
the tower blocks themselves, the likelihood of having such a disorder increased the
higher up one lived. He admits, though, that living in high-rises does not always cause
stress pointing out that in Singapore and Hong Kong people cope 'far more
successfully' (Giradet, 1996, p. 82) due to better design, better supervision and the
mutual support provided by the extended family. This can be contrasted to those
countries where high-rises have simply become 'dumping grounds for the less
fortunate' where drugs, crime and vandalism are daily occurrences.
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The Sustainable City
This brief history of urban events and change demonstrate some of the forces and
rationalities driving the waxing and waning of different cities over the ages. More
recently, however, it has become popular to explore these changes in terms of global
limits generally and a given city or region's bio-physical resource management more
specifically. Stories in this vein talk about ancient Mesopotamia, for example, where
the city of Mashkan-Shipir become unliveable within a short time because the
surrounding fields were destroyed by the mineral salts that were a consequence of
their inigation teclmiques. The Anasazi of Chaco Canyon in the American South-west
gradually deserted their hunter.:.gatherer lifestyle in the 6th century AD in favour of the
cultivation of crops. Their sudden abandonment of the pueblo is commonly attributed
to overuse of the surrounding lands and declining productivity which left them unable
to withstand prolonged periods of drought. Those who wish to draw parallels between
these seemingly uneducated or ignorant choices of the ancients and our contemporary
state favour these types of explanations. A very local example is that of Lakes Forsyth
and Ellesmere, near Christchurch, both of which have been declared technically
'dead' in that they can no longer sustain the variety oflife they once did owing to
pollution and the invasion of pests and weeds.
Swyngedouw and Kaika (2000, p. 570) have noted that while the rhetoric might have
.changed, with new concepts like sustainability becoming fashionable, 'a deep anti
urban sentiment combined with an idealised and romanticised invocation of a
'superior' natural order has rarely been so loud'. So although it may be the case that
sustainable cities are currently in vogue, the reasons behind this do little to celebrate
the urban condition. Two main factors have led to the city as a target of action
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directed towards bio-physical enviromnental sustainability. The first factor is the
growing awareness that almost half of the world's population now resides in cities
and towns. Increased urbanisation since the Industrial Revolution has increased the
size, impact and importance of cities as ecological entities. The second aspect is the
need for achievable local solutions to seemingly unassailable global problems
(Atkinson and Davila, 1999; Mercer and Jotkowitz, 2000; Finco, and Nijkamp, 2001;
Welch, 2003) and the city as an administrative entity provides for a number of
possibilities. Local Agenda 21 is an example of situated attempts to address global
bio-physical enviromnental problems such as species extinction, ozone depletion and
global warming. Conceptual tools such as the ecological footprint model (Walker and
Rees, 1997) have also been used. Walker and Rees (1997, p. 97) define the ecological
footprint of a given population as 'the total area of productive land and water required
on a continuous basis to produce all the resources consumed, and to assimilate all the
waste produced, by that population, wherever on earth that land is located '. The
concept has been employed to calculate and compare the footprints of various cities,
countries (Earth Council, 1996) and even housing types (Walker and Rees, 1997).
Rees (1997a and b) has even argued that we need to reformulate our idea of what a
city is, based on its footprint, because this footprint generally extends far beyond the
boundaries of the city as, for example, an administrative unit. He stated that cities as
we understand them now are 'incomplete systems' that physically occupy less than 1
per cent ofthe ecosystem area upon which they rely. For Rees, the ways in which a
city might reduce its ecological footprint includes integrated city planning and open
space planning, better use of green areas and pursuing economic development that has
no impact on ecosystems. Self-sufficiency is key.
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A variation on this theme employing concepts from ecology to the city involves the
evaluation of the 'metabolism' of an urban area. It is now common to speak of cities
in terms of whether its metabolism is linear or circular. 'Linear' metabolic processes
involve unthinking resource use with 'no thought for the consequences' and where
inputs are unrelated to outputs (Girardet, 1996). Nutrients are taken from the land,
made into consumer items which are then and converted to waste, destined for the
landfill or some other 'sink'. 'Circular' metabolism, in contrast, seeks to reorganise
the way a city functions, reusing outputs as inputs into other processes. In this way,
'Sewerage works are designed to function as fertiliser factories ... [and] household
and factory rubbish is regarded as an asset. .. [when] recycling is integral to the
functioning of cities' (ibid, p. 23).
Fitting with the use of biological terms is Giradet's (1996, p. 86) description of the
city as a parasite - 'an organism that lives, and is dependent on, another host from
which it is nourished'. The parasitic tendencies of cities express themselves as a drain
on energy converted from fossil fuels or nuclear material, waste which is often
disposed of, or has consequences, beyond the city limits. Commonly, human waste
(which has been described by Girardet (1996, p. 94) as a 'valuable substance' that can
be used as a fertiliser) and chemical waste are mixed together resulting in a 'toxic
cocktail' (p. 98) that is no good for anything. Cities are also the primary consumers of
charcoal, timber and pulp, and these demands have led to deforestation in both
surrounding and distant areas. This in tum causes a loss of topsoil, contamination,
rising temperatures and reduced moisture. Forests also act as carbon sinks thereby
converting CO2 into oxygen and water. Cities also use huge amounts of water that
must then be disposed of at a later date. Landfills become home to a multitude of
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household and industrial wastes, some of which can be recycled employing the
circular metabolism described above, but many others cannot. These landfills produce
leachates which contaminate the land and adjacent water systems. The private
motorcar is a major polluter emitting nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide and carbon
monoxide. These issues all combine to compromise the health of the city as a
'biological organism', a discursive metaphor evident in other terms including 'urban
blight', 'green lungs' and 'arterial' problems.
Active urban ecology is a movement that emerged in the 1970s to specifically address
these concerns. First mooted by Richard Register who founded the non-profit
organisation Urban Ecology in 1975 (Roseland, 1997), early versions ofthe
movement were very action-oriented and the relationships between humans and
nature were not theorised comprehensively. This active urban ecology targeted
building 'slow streets', restoring urban wetlands and waterways, planting and
harvesting fruit-bearing trees on the streets, building solar greenhouses, obstructing
the construction of a local freeway, and the publication of Eco-city Berkeley in 1987.
The organisation founded the journal The Urban Ecologist and organised the first
International Eco-city conference in 1990. Another significant achievement was the
establishment of a set of principles that helped define urban ecology (Roseland, 1997,
p. 3) and included:
1. Reorganising land use in order to encourage compact, diverse, green,
safe, pleasant and mixed use communities near transit nodes and
transport facilities;
106
2. Recasting transportation priorities to encourage pedestrian and bicycle
traffic over automobiles;
3. Restoring unhealthy urban bio-physical environments such as waterways
and shorelines;
4. Supporting local agriculture and community gardening;
5. Encouraging recycling, appropriate technological innovations and
resource conservation;
6. Promoting environmentally sound economic activities among the
business community;
7. Raising awareness of the local and regional bio-physical environment
and sustainability issues.
The remaining three principles relate to social goals such as ensuring the availability
of affordable housing, encouraging social justice and promoting 'voluntary simplicity'
instead of over-consumption (ibid, p.3).
These principles of urban ecology have influenced the development of terms like
sustainable cities and urban sustainability, which generally try to combine these sorts
ofbio-physical environmental and social goals with economic development (Elkin
and McLaren, 1991; Haughton and Hunter, 1994; Nijkamp and Perrels, 1994; Beatiy,
2000; Evans, 2002; Freeman and Thompson-Fawcett, 2002; Adger et aI., 2003;
Portney, 2003). The principles associated with urban ecology have also informed
particular planning movements such as Smart Growth (English, 1999; Geller, 2003),
New Urbanism (McCarter, 1998; Talen, 1999; Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck,
107
2000), Green Urbanism (Beatly, 2000), Traditional Neighbourhood Design (Till,
1993) and the Compact City.
The compact city
One of the more popular articulations of sustainable urban forms is the compact city,
defined by Burgess (2000, p.9) as cities that 'increase built area and residential
population densities to intensify urban economic, social and cultural activities and to
manipulate urban size, form and structure and settlement systems in pursuit of the
environmental, social and global sustainability benefits derived from the
concentration of urban functions'. Whilst specific reference to compaction is often
absent or downplayed in policy statements and planning documents, urban growth
boundaries (containment), zoning, urban renewal and infilling (consolidation) all
serve to increase residential densities. The standard suburban quarter acre section or
lot that was once a feature of North American, Australian and New Zealand cities has
been replaced with much smaller versions, even as the trend for larger housing grows.
The downsizing of sections, consolidation and containment are ostensibly advanced
as efforts to manage urban sprawl, a term defined by Tregoning, Ageyeman and
Shenot (2002, p.341) as a 'popular pejorative' for 'poorly planned growth that
consumes precious open spaces, mars the landscape with ugly development [and
causes] traffic jams, crowded schools and a host of other ills'. According to English
(1999, p.36):
Sprawl sucks the life out of older downtowns and neighbourhoods. It destroys community character and countryside. It reduces opportunities for face-to-face interaction among people, thereby making it more difficult to create, or retain, a sense of community. Sprawl forecloses alternatives to the automobile as a means oftranspOli. And
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sprawl leaves older cities and towns with excessively high concentrations of poverty and attendant social problems.
In the contemporary planning orthodoxy, it is believed that the benefits of urban
compaction include the preservation of agricultural land and greenbelt peripheries,
and thus maintain the productive capacity of the sun"ounding land as well as the
wildlife stocks that inhabit the periphery. The potential to reduce automobile use with
an accompanying decrease in the use of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide emissions and
traffic congestion is also listed as a benefit (Newman and Kenworthy, 1989). Mixed
use (of commercial, industrial and residential) should enable employees to walk to
work, thus decreasing the need for private automobiles (Grant, 2002). Although
subject to a great deal of debate, proponents of the compact city list cultural and social
advantages as well. Informal surveillance resulting from more people walking,
cycling and playing on the streets should increase general street safety. A more
compact form should also correspond to greater community activity, vibrancy and
greater equality in access to resources because access to resources is no longer car-
dependent (Hillman, 1996; Elkin et al., 1991). In a less car-dependent society, time
that would otherwise have been spent in traffic jams could be spent with family and
friends or on other leisure activities. Jacobs' (1961) Death and Life of Great American
Cities (1961) and more recently Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck's Suburban Nation:
The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000) are often invoked
to add weight to these claims (but for further discussion see Breheney, 1995;
Crookston, Clark and Averly, 1996; Jenks, Burton and Williams, 1996, 1998,2000;
Campbell, 1999; Jenks and Burgess, 2000; de Roo and Miller, 2000; and in New
Zealand Gow, 2000; Dixon, Dupuis and Lysnar, 2001; Dixon and Dupuis, 2003).
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The combination ofthese economic, bio-physical environmental and social benefits
makes a compelling case for the compact city, however, there has been a growing
reaction against this type of urban form. Troy (1996a, 1996b), one of the earliest
critics of compaction, argued that the bio-physical environmental rationale was weak
and that this urban fonn could mean a rise in real estate prices that would make
healthy housing unaffordable and exacerbate inequality (also see Breheny, 1996,
1997; Ancell, 2005). The authors ofthe Demographia Surveys (Wendell-Cox and
Pavletich, 2004, 2006) have adopted a similar argument based on their comparison of
median house and median income multipliers of 100 cities. Those cities with
multipliers of 3 or less were deemed affordable; those of 3.1 to 4 moderately
unaffordable; 4.1 - 5 were called seriously unaffordable and those with multipliers of
5.1 and above were severely unaffordable. One of the factors leading to unaffordable
housing markets was the type of residential land restriction associated with urban
compaction. Of course, the other side ofthis scenario is that some people, particularly
residential and commercial real estate developers, stand to gain considerable wealth
from intensified land use (Logan and Molotch, 1996). Gordon and Richardson (1997)
also raised questions about the desirability of urban compaction for its environmental
and social effects and Crane's (1996) study oftravel patterns in compact cities
suggested that neo-traditional neighbourhoods, which are based on the concept of
traditional, walkable communities, might actually raise the levels of 'vehicle miles
travelled' because trips are shorter and cheaper but more frequent. Finally, there is
also some debate as to whether or not the suburban garden, despite being much
maligned, does not support more biodiversity than those areas (rural) or strategies
(urban infilling) usually associated with sustainability. Certainly, the pictures
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presented in Figure 7 indicate the suburban garden might be more accommodating in
this regard. 30
Figure 7: Visions of Biodiversity?
A new wave of criticism has also been directed at the social consequences of
compaction. Bruegmann's Sprawl: A Compact History (2005) and Kruse and
Sugrue's The New Suburban History (2006) do not deny that sprawl has its problems,
but insist on a revised view of suburban development. Bruegmann argues that
increased density - one of the aspirations of the compact city - is a blunt instrument
that does little to illustrate how people actually live; higher densities do not
necessarily equal environmentally friendly behaviour. In his history Bruegmann posits
this latest anti-sprawl effort based on environmentalism as just the latest in a series of
30 I would like to acknowledge Bob Day, National President of the Housing Industry Association, who made this point in a similar series of photos during his address to the Mckenna Institute (2005).
111
attacks on suburban living. He quotes architect Williams-Ellis' England and the
Octopus (in Bruegmann, 2005, p. 117-118), which, he maintains, is 'drenched in class
resentment' :
As the Joneses fly from the town, so does the country fly from the pink bungalow that they have perched so hopefully on its eligible site. The true countryman will know that the area is infected - the Joneses have brought the blight of their town or suburb with them - and in all probability they and their home will be followed by an incursion of like-minded people similarly housed, and the country will be found to have further withdrawn itself beyond the skyline in its losing retreat towards the sea.
Other arguments used in later anti-sprawl campaigns were the supposedly higher
financial costs of unplanned growth and/or the 'social, intellectual and artistic
poverty' of suburbia (Bruegmann, 2005, p. 125). Many of these arguments against
sprawl, authors in this vein point out, are specious. Despite critics of suburban life,
such as Lewis Mumford, insisting on a bland and monochromatic view of the. suburbs,
suburban living is an age-old phenomenon that persists because it meets many
people's needs very well. This is evident in the establishment of the Save Our
Suburbs (SOS) movement in Australia which started in Victoria but has since spread
to other cities. Organised and run by volunteers, SOS aims to preserve residential
amenity, discourage inappropriate development in residential areas and ensure that the
responsibility for the planning of the suburbs remains primarily in the hands oflocal
councils.
Advocates of the compact city argue that this is the most sustainable urban form, yet,
a brief overview of some of the issues involved highlights the complexity of this
seemingly straightforward claim. The movement's bio-physical environmental
underpinnings are contentious - more assumed than proven. Many of the economic
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arguments are a double-edged sword with the maximal use of infrastructure offset by
higher maintenance and servicing costs. In social terms, residents wishing to escape
the 'rat race' and the 'concrete jungle' do not always welcome the vitality and
vibrancy of sidewalk living of the kind Jane Jacobs outlined in the Life and Death of
American Cities (1961). More nebulous social goals, such as equitable access to
healthy housing, can be made difficult or impossible in a market of reduced land
supply.
Sustainable cities and urban sustainability
These issues discussed in relation to the compact city highlight the urban as a
complex of not only bio-physical environmental concerns, but also social and
economic forces as well. Indeed, as Lewontin (1997, in Swyngedouw and Kaika,
2000, p. 570) has pointed out:
A rational environmental movement cannot be built on the demand to save the environment, which, in any case, does not exist ... Remaking the world is the universal property of living organisms and is inextricably bound up with their nature. Rather we must decide what kind of world we want to live in and then try to manage the process of change as best we can to approximate it.
Economic and social factors have a central role to play in this making of the world.
Urban sustainability is a catch-all phrase that conveniently summarises many of our
aspirations in this regard. The term is often invoked as justification for a wide range
of decisions that culminate in the built form of the city which then performs on, and
for, its inhabitants. Though decisions are often disguised as technical bio-physical
environmental issues, the compact city debate highlights the role of less tangible
elements in the fOlmation and evolution of our cities. From the religious to the
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compact city, I would argue, as have Fernandez-Almesto (2000) and Carter (1983, p.
114), that:
The plan and built form of the town are direct reflections of the nature of culture on the large scale ... and of social organisation on the smaller scale ... It is a truism that the town epitomises in its physical nature the complex of political, economic and social forces which characterised the period of its creation.
This raises some questions about the role of established and newly identified political,
economic and social aspects of urban change and sustainability. One of the more
recent variations on the good city and sustainability is the notion of dematerialisation.
According to Bridge and Watson (2000), dematerialisation has three distinct strands
with the first pertaining to the degree to which manufacturing functions are separated
by subcontracting (perhaps to different countries), just-in-time production techniques
or specialisation. The second form of dematerialisation concerns the ways in which
money has become disconnected from material things as is the case with futures
markets, floating exchange rates and credit. The final strand they identify is based on
the work of Cast ells (1996, 1997 and 1998) who argued that we now live in a
networked information economy where place is less important than connectedness.
Though Castells' theory has been furiously negated by those who insist on the
importance of place (see, for example, Sassen, 1998, 2000, Amin, 2000 or Gleeson
and Low, 2000 for balanced critiques) his ideas have been adopted by a number of
scholars who portray information as the most recent requirement in the changing
fortunes of cities. In the days of the old mills, for example, it was essential to be
adjacent to strong flowing rivers for production and profit. Several decades later the
advent of electricity made this requirement obsolete. Proximity to rail was another
advantage for those involved in the manufacturing of goods, yet this former necessity
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is neither here nor there in an age of ubiquitous roading networks and airfreight.
Indeed, whole cities now find themselves obsolete, particularly in those regions where
the manufacturing industries have moved to take advantage of cheaper labour costs in
less developed countries. In the Northeast of the United States, some cities are
described pejoratively as being located in the rust-belt, an appropriate label for cities
in slow decline. Eminem's 8 Mile is a excellent portrayal of the monotonous yet
corrosive hardships residents face when key industries move elsewhere leaving
unemployment, crime and a wealth of other social problems. Such cities can be
compared with those in the more salubrious and vibrant sun-belt states, and academic
attention has shifted from the curiosities associated with industrial production to those
of the service or knowledge and information industries. As Thorns (2002) noted, the
raw material of these cities are ideas and knowledge and their new requirements are
research institutions and access to 'knowledge-flows' (see also Newton, 1995).
Kanter, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, has argued that today's
successful cities are either 'makers' engaged in manufacturing and production,
'thinkers' who work with ideas and concepts, or 'traders' who form focal points of
exchange between different countries and cultures. Neo-liberalism and fiscal crises
have ensured a shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism with cities 'recast as
players in a rough and tumble pursuit of highly mobile capital' played at both the
national and international level (Gleeson and Low, 2000, p. 16; also see Low,
Gleeson, Elander and Lidskog, 2000; Castree, 2006). While a different set of
imperatives, such as attracting investment in primary and secondary industries,
operate in less developed countries, the so-called 'First World' has diverted some of
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its focus towards attracting skilled workers who are clever, mobile and willing to
move to those places that provide a good quality of life.
The ways in which a city brands itself in order to take part in this competition is
having a profound effect on the ways in which our cities are constmcted not just
physically but mentally as well. This idea has been a feature of Eade and Mele's
(2002, p. 6) discussion of developments in urban theory. They note that urban
imagery should be seen as a 'constitutive element in the social production ofthe city
[where] the built form of the city and the interpretative schemas of different social
groups are in active engagement. .. The imaginary ... acts and is acted upon through
the production of the city'. The authors thus recognise that these elements of place are
contested (see also Jess and Massey, 1995) and that limited attention is given to the
inequitable politics of place-making and the consequences oflimited participation of
certain under-privileged groups (also see Brody, Godschalk, and Burby, 2003; Jayne,
2003; Schollman, Perkins and Moore, 2001). Fraser (2000, in Fincher, Jacobs and
Anderson, 2002, p. 31) expressed concern over this, arguing that politics based on
actual material conditions is losing ground to the politics of identity at a time when
'an aggressively expanding capitalism is radically exacerbating economic inequality'.
A large part of this debate over branding and successfully attracting desirable, mobile
workers centres on the sorts of activities and lifestyles that appeal most to this group
(see Pawson, 1999, for a discussion of such 'urban entrepreneurialism' in New
Zealand). An avid proponent ofthe power of information and innovation, Florida,
author of The Rise afthe Creative Class (2003a), insists that successful cities will be
those that can attract 'creative' groups including those in their 20s, students, artists
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and homosexuals. Sydney, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle are Florida's favourite
cities; interestingly enough, they also have the lowest percentages of families. On the
other side of this debate is Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History (2005) who
warns that the data Florida used to form his conclusions are outdated (based on the
dot.com boom) and that 'many of the most prized members of the 'creative class' are
not 25-year-old hip cools, but forty-something adults who, particularly ifthey have
children, end up gravitating to the suburbs' (Kotkin, Nov, 2005). Using a study of
artists and their role in the urban economy, Markusen (2006) is similarly sceptical of a
straightforward causal relationship between creativity and urban growth. Furthennore,
using Florida's figures, Peck (2005, p. 66) has pointed out that if roughly a third of
the population can be seen as members of this desirable creative class, two thirds are
left 'languishing in the working and service classes, who get nothing apart from
occasional tickets to the circus'.
Thoms (2002, p. 75-76) has written about this division between the desired and
unwanted in terms of the 'two faces' of the postmodem city, though others have
called this phenomenon the dual city (Fainstein and Harloe, 2000) or even the 'city in
quarters' (Marcuse, 2000). The first ofthese faces is the glitzier, ostensibly
prosperous city of wine bars and casinos; the second is that of the 'excluded'
relegated to 'urban ghettos' of the homeless and the poor. The separation ofthese two
cities is masked by a media-generated illusion suggesting a common, shared culture
and urban experience. Kotkin (2005) gives a good example of this in his portrayal of
New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina. Referring to the limitations of culture-based
economies of the so-called 'hip' cities, like New Orleans, he writes that its reputation
117
did not prevent manufacturing, trade, finance, engineering, energy and medical
industries from decamping to other states. He noted:
Lost in the ghastly images of New Orleans's poor is the fact that the city's whites, about 27 per cent ofthe population, are wealthier and more educated than their counterparts nationwide. They, of course, welcomed the new nightclubs, coffee shops and galleries that dotted their grander neighbourhoods. New Orleans epitomised the inequality ofthe hip cool city. While the national gap between black and white per capita income stands at about $9,000, in New Orleans it is almost $20,000.
One of Kotkin's arguments is that gross disparities such as those found in New
Orleans lead to a tension that many find unwholesome and this affects the
sustainability of cities in profound ways. Social infrastructure and making people feel
safe and secure, are essential parts of a city's appeal in the under these new economic
conditions, he argues.
These are exactly the types of issues Putman discussed in his book Bowling Alone:
The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). His argument is that social
infrastructure and community are aspects of social capital and that this form of capital
is essential to a strong economy. His evidence that social capital is in decline, hinted
at in the title, included the observation that while the number of individual bowlers
increased by 10 per cent from 1980 to 1993, league (community-based) bowling
actually decreased by 40 per cent. Amin (2000) adopts a similar argument in his
discussion of social capital and the social economy. He noted that talk about 'the
economy' often ignores voluntary, non-profit or other informal economic activities.
Social capital involving cooperation, trust and friendship are necessary for a healthy
formal economy and can be measured in the levels of voluntary work, civic
118
engagement or voter turnout. Though this argument has its detractors (see Florida,
2003b, for example, who argued that not everyone wants to live in a community
based civil society), authors like Amin believe that the social economy makes use of
social capital, often through the establishment and operation of non-profit
organisations which helps to create jobs and other assets. This debate does raise some
interesting questions about the formal and informal ways in which citizens might
legitimately participate in the construction of the city (see Brody, Godschalk and
Burby, 2003).
All these factors - the creative classes, inequality, cities as growth machines, social
capital and participation - point to urban sustainability as involving more than just a
greening of the city. Whilst the city as an administrative unit is an excellent location
in which bio-physical environmental policies can be implemented, the urban as a
condition alerts us to the need to be mindful of established goals surrounding social
and economic issues. This has led me to make a tentative distinction between
sustainable cities and urban sustainability. This division is based less on the semantic
underpinnings of the terms as the need to distinguish between sustainable cities as
bio-physical environmental entities and locations (ecosystems) and urban
sustainability which takes into account the urban as a condition. My investigation of
urban practitioners' understanding and interpretation of urban sustainability will
attend to these distinctions.
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Chapter Five: Grounding the Study - An Introduction to Christchurch
Neither the use or the meaning of the terms 'urban' or 'sustainability' are as
straightforward as their ubiquity suggests, yet my task is to explore what urban
practitioners make of these terms in the context of their everyday professional
practice. Exploring the interconnections between practitioners' various roles was
important so I chose to ground my research, quite literally, in a particular place.
Figure 8: Christchurch, New Zealand
Located on the east coast of the South Island,
the city of Christchurch was ideal in a
number of respects: As New Zealand's
second largest city with a population of
approximately 325 000 people,31 it is more
typical of other New Zealand cities than
Auckland which has a substantially larger
population of one million32. The City Council
has, or certainly has had in the past, a stronger
social orientation than many other local
authorities in the country and Christchurch
is sometimes called 'the People's
Republic' , though it is more commonly ( www.christchurch.org.nz)
31 The greater region has a population of approximately 800000 people. 32 This figure combines Auckland, Waitakere, Manukau, Rodney and North Shore. Wellington's population (if one includes the Hutt and Porirua) stands at about 330000, Hamilton's at 125 000, Dunedin's at 121 000, and Tauranga's at 100000.
120
referred to as 'The Garden City'. 33
Figure 9: The Garden City
( www.christchurch.org.nzlPhotoGallery)
As a regional centre with a population of approximately 4000000 people it builds on
New Zealand's traditional agricultural industries, and, in the last decade, larger-scale
corporate dairying. Yet it is also connected to the global economy via more recent
knowledge-based enterprises, such as electronics and information technology. 34
33 Christchurch has won a number of international awards based on its Garden City image, including the Outstanding Garden City in 1996 where Christchurch was chosen over 620 international competitors. Christchurch was also the Overall Winner of the Major Cities Nations in Bloom in 1997 to officially become 'the Garden City of the World'. High levels of infilling have no doubt contributed to the city's lowered success rates in this regard over the last decade, but it is still described as very beautiful. 34 Interestingly enough, whilst Christchurch has not had a great deal of recent success in Garden City awards, the City Council did win a 2006 Performance Excellence Study Award in the local government sector. These awards 'recognise business achievement and performance against the international criteria' (CCC media release, 2006, emphasis added).
121
Urban form
British colonists established the city in the mid 1800s according to careful plans that
guided both physical form and social composition. The Canterbury Association, under
the auspices of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, aimed to transplant a selective pOliion of
British society into this new colony on the other side of the world. Consistent with his
vision of Christchurch as a compact, agricultural settlement, would-be purchasers of
the newly apportioned rural lots in what was to become Christchurch had to be
members of the Church of England and be of 'good character' (Rice, 1999, pp.12-13).
The Canterbury Association's plan was to 'set an example of a colonial settlement, in
which, from the first, all the elements, including the very highest, of a good and right
state of society, shall find their proper place' (in McIntyre, 2000, p.86).
The physical form of the city was influenced by new surveying techniques which
allowed for precise parcels of land, of a quarter acre, to be laid out in a uniform grid
like pattern. These sections (lots) were sold at 'sufficient price' to raise the revenue
necessary for schools, churches and other public works. The price also ensured that
those with limited means could be excluded. The city was thus a manifestation of
economic interests, moral ambition and social manipulation. The ownership of a
home on a section large enough to eliminate any lingering memory of England's
industrial cities were ideals that heavily influenced the city's development.
Also in a general and lasting sense, Pawson (2002, p. 201) has noted that the colony's
fledgling towns, including Christchurch, 'encapsulated and symbolised the taming of
the "howling wilderness'''. Con'espondingly, rural areas were to look 'extremely
controlled and tidy' to indicate sovereignty over nature (Egoz, Bowring and Perkins,
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2006). This was not only applied to the bio-physical environment, but could be
extrapolated conceptually to include the indigenous Maori who were also subjected to
manifold attempts at civilisation, though not without more 'prolonged and effective
resistance than standard sources reveal' (ibid). Early colonists' delight in the
modification and cultivation of their surroundings had some interesting results, often
making urban inhabitants more rather than less vulnerable to the vagaries of flood,
earthquake, fire, storms and other 'natural' phenomena (ibid). Thus, it has already
been noted that the separation of society form the wider environment can be unwise,
even dangerous.
Figure 10: Central Christchurch Framed by the Four Avenues
(www.christchurchnz.net/canterbury/ChchMap)
Though this severance of the rural/urban and nature/culture arguably remains, and
may even be stronger (Swaffield and Fairweather, 1997; Newton, Fairweather and
Swaffield, 2002), other aspects of New Zealand's urban areas have undergone
123
significant change. Though still high by international standards, levels of home-
ownership in Christchurch (and the rest of New Zealand) have fallen dramatically
over the last few years. Just over 71 per cent of Christchurch's homes were owner-
occupied in 1991, but this figure had fallen to 65 per cent by 2001 (CCC, 2004).
Census figures from 2006 are not yet available but studies undertaken by private
research groups suggest this downwards trend has continued with the decrease in
home ownership attributed to a national drop in housing affordability (Massey
University, 2006; Demographia, 2006). As shown in the figure below, home
ownership is higher in the outer suburbs (as high as 90 per cent in some cases) but the
rates are lower among Maori, Pacific Islands people, single parent families, people on
low incomes and those in the 25-39 years age bracket. In particular, sympathy for this
last group of those of child-bearing age has raised public awareness of the housing
affordability issues in New Zealand and has led to significant debate around land
supply and zoning mechanisms in urban management.
Figure 11. Distribution of Home Ownership Rates in Christchurch
Owner· Occupied DweIings as a , of fIriv •• 0weIings in Ii8ch _a Unit
There have been substantial changes to the city's physical form as well. The compact
agricultural settlement has given way to an urban area covering a fairly substantial
45,240 hectares ofland with the same kinds oflow-density residential areas that
characterise much of urban New Zealand. Dwelling densities are much higher in and
around the Central Business District. The average residential density with the four
avenues that frame the CBD is 17 dwellings per hectare and 9 dwellings per hectare in
the suburbs (CCC, 2004). The types of dwellings found in the city has also changed.
The quarter acre section or lot has become something of a rarity owing to the City
Council's Canterbury Regional Planning Scheme, implemented in the mid-1980s, of
urban 'containment' policy based around green belts at the city's periphery. More
recently, the Christchurch City Plan, which is a requirement of the Resource
Management Act (1991), speaks of 'urban consolidation' which relies primarily on
infilling. Infill housing35 is one means of consolidating urban form by increasing
housing densities within existing residential areas. The city is thus a mixture of
medium density housing and commercial properties within the CBD framed by four
avenues, with housing densities decreasing as one moves towards the periphery.
Grounding the research
While the city of Christchurch provided a suitable general location within which I
might ground my study, three issues around urban planning, management and form
provided conceptual focus. The first of these was The Southwest Area Plan which
covered an established part of the city at the urban edge experiencing rapid new
growth. The second topical issue was the advent and development of The Greater
35 Infill housing, as defined by Plew in a study for the Christchurch City Council (1999, p.l), is 'one or more new townhouses built behind, in front of or beside an existing older house ... [or] where the original older house has been demolished'.
125
Christchurch Urban Design Strategy; an attempt by the five local councils
(comprising the now defunct Banks Peninsula District Council, the Selwyn and
Waimakariri District Councils, the Christchurch City Council, the Regional Council
(Environment Canterbury)) and Transit New Zealand to develop and implement a
strategic plan for the Canterbury region based on a selies of four growth options and
scenarios. Both the Southwest Area Plan and the Urban Design Strategy can be seen
as attempts to resuscitate the kind of strategic planning that had fallen from favour in
the mid-1980s Finally, the Amendment to the Local Government Act (1989) and the
subsequent requirement for Long-Term Council Community Plans was still too new
to serve the purpose of grounding my research, at least in the initial phase, though it
did inform the later stages of my research.
The Southwest Area Plan
The Southwest Area Plan was first mooted in 2003 and-appears to have been used as
something of a pilot for the more ambitious Greater Christchurch Urban Design
Strategy which followed. The SWAP, as it is known, was based on a number of
'technical studies' which addressed key issues facing the area. These included:
transport and the capacity of the transport network; protection of the quality and
quantity of ground water, surface water, springs management and flooding; the
ecology of the aquatic environment; the impact of land use change upon ground
water; cultural issues; open space and landscape values; land contamination; versatile
soils; and establishing 'sustainable' community facilities and focal points.
The City Council consulted the public about the Plan in March 2004 with a small
scale questiomlaire (66 respondents) constituting a significant part of this process. Of
126
these respondents 80 per cent held negative views about the way development had
been (mis)managed in the area. Aspects of their area that respondents saw as under
threat from this 'lack of planning' included the rural atmosphere, access to the city
and local facilities, green space and community spirit.
The initial impetus behind the development of the plan and its implementation
appears to have slowed since its inception in 2003. While it has provided a useful
focus for my research in terms of data collection, particularly the selection of certain
interviewees, its relative importance appears to have been subsumed by the Greater
Christchurch Urban Design Strategy and the Long-term Council Community Plan.
The Greater Christchurch Urban Design Strategy
The Greater Christchurch Urban Design Strategy is a response to a perceived need for
greater coordination and cooperation between the six local and regional councils and
Transit New Zealand. Calling on local leaders and urban design experts, a series of
four options was devised with each accommodating the predicted population growth
of 120,000 people by 2041 in different ways. The four options (and the manner in
which they are described and conveyed) are worthy of a fairly detailed examination.
'The Issues', as outlined in the Urban Design Strategy booklet So Many Options,
Which Will You Choose? (2005), are organised around four main themes:
• Land use and housing
... Where the Forum expects population growth and asks the public whether they
would like the city to go out or up. Some implications for travel times, shopping and
housing forms are presented.
• Transport
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... Where traffic congestion is outlined as threatening the environment at 'increasing
cost'. Traffic projections are for a 40-59 per cent increase.
• Community Identity
... In which urbanisation is making an impact on the character of our communities.
'Should we be concerned about old character homes being demolished to make way
for blocks of two - three storey apartments?' we are asked.
• Natural Environment
... Open spaces, natural habitats, water, natural hazards and climate change are
discussed.
The website (www.greaterchristchurch.org.nz) also lists a number of trends that need
to be considered, comprising population growth placing new demands on housing
with a further 62, 000 dwellings required; an aging population; small towns are
getting bigger and may even double in size; traffic congestion is rising and may
increase by 40 per cent by 2021 and 320 per cent by 2041; water quality and quantity
are being threatened with pollution found in 50 per cent of the shallow wells within
Christchurch City; poor development is impacting on people's sense of place;
infrastructure is already taxed beyond its limit in some areas and will need further
upgrading; and councils and communities need to work together.
Keeping these considerations in mind, readers are asked to evaluate four growth
management options. The first ofthese is 'Business as Usual' which is outlined on the
website (www.greaterchristchurch.org.nz/Options/) in the summary in the following
way:
128
• Development is between Christchurch and rural towns, and
southwest to Rolleston and Lincoln, around Lyttelton Harbour and
north of the Waimakariri River
• 21 % of new housing is urban renewal (13,000 townhouses and
apartments) and 79% in new subdivisions (49,000 new houses)
• Farmland/open space required for housing 120,000 additional
people is 4,920 hectares equivalent to 26 Hagley Parks
• 320% increase in congestion by 20411500,000 people, commute
takes 55% longer (a 30 minute trip today would take 47 minutes in
2041)
• To avoid traffic congestion increases, new road construction,
widening / maintenance costs $2 billion by 2041 ($206 per
household annually)
• Walking, cycling and public transport are poor alternatives to
driving
• Infrastructure for new subdivisions costs $560 million by 2041
• Increased water demand
• Threats to natural landscapes, such as the Port Hills, as
development spreads
For those who might experience problems digesting this wealth of information in this
format, a map depicting the anticipated layout of such a city is also provided (see
Figure 12), however, this bullet point summary suggests that the 'facts' can 'speak for
The other three options are presented in a very similar in style despite a vastly
different content, with each option varying according to where growth is to be
directed. The map that accompanies Option A, for example, shows growth as
concentrated largely within the city of Christchurch and a few existing towns.
Figure 13: Option A Map for 2041
an
• r ........ _ -• =~.NPI
(www.greaterchristchurch.org.nz/Options/AI)
130
Members of the public were invited to comment on these options during April and
May 2005, and over 3,250 submissions were received. This was a record for local
body consultations in Canterbury. The vast majority of submissions - 96 per cent -
were in favour of growth being directed into existing towns and urban areas, rather
than towards greenfield development and flllther sprawl.
In terms of my research, both the Southwest Area Plan and the Greater Christchurch
Urban Design Strategy proved very useful documents. They not only helped me to
ground my study in a particular place, they also provided an 'official record' of the
issues participants saw as significant. These plans also signified another issue that was
to become important in light of the interview data outlined in later chapters; this may
be described as a technocratic discourse heavily reliant on statistics and numerical
data. This approach, combined with the emphasis on consultation, indicates an uneasy
tension between what Ericksen, Berke, Crawford and Dixon (2003, p. 30) describe as
'rational' and 'participatory' approaches to planning. This has consequences for the
rhetoric that characterises these plans; while they may indicate return to the kind of
strategic planning that was largely abandoned during the 1990s, the language used
marks a distinct shift away from the moral content that characterised New Zealand's
early urban planning and development towards a techno-rationality. This has
implications for the 'DAD' model of consultation which often utilises a 'Decide,
Announce, Defend' strategy (Twyford, in Ledbury, 2003, p. 8) and can employ
'experts' in a somewhat antagonistic relationship with 'lay people' (Brooks, 2006). In
order to understand the significance of this transition and its implications, it is
important to contextualise these plans within a more substantive overview of New
Zealand's wider political, legislative and planning climate.
131
New Zealand's Urban Planning History
Until recently, New Zealand's approach to urban planning essentially reflected that
adopted in Great Britain though it must be said that our colonial past was, if anything,
even more heavily informed by romantic versions of the rural and a strong anti-urban
sentiment. This has its roots in the timing of colonial settlement which occurred
during the period of rapid industrialisation in England, a time which saw appalling
living conditions for the majority of urban dwellers there (Meacham, 1998). Early
urban planners emphasised both home ownership and section size36 because as
Freestone (1985, p.15) noted 'Culturally, the English country cottage was the model
dwelling and if immigrants could not be yeoman farmers then they could at least tend
suburban gardens'. Home ownership and sizeable sections with detached homes were
not only thought to ensure physical health but moral probity as well. Malcom Mason,
for example, in his position as head of the Health Department, newly established in
1904, wrote:
Small houses and no gardens mean ill health, discontent, and a lack of interest in the home. Pride of domicile is one of the most powerful factors in the family life, and absence of it is accompanied by much that is antagonistic to the physical weal ofthe State ... Between the mental effect ofliving in a small house with a horizon bounded by the backs of similarly uninteresting edifices, and living in a cottage with a flower garden in front and a vegetable garden behind, there is a very great deal. The public house and the theatre lose much of their attraction, while the effect on children is of the greatest moment (in Tennant, 2000, p. 28).
This theme is reiterated in later documents with Isaac and Olssen (2000, p. 110)
stating that an examination of the proceedings of the Ministry of Health conference in
1919 revealed' a broad consensus that saw in slums the cause of social pathogens'.
36 Typically these were a quarter acre.
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Until the mid-1980s the State, either by economic assistance programmes such as the
Advances to Workers Act (1905) or state (public) housing provision, actively
encouraged both owner-occupation and detached dwellings on large sections. The
effects of unregulated land subdivision became evident in the early 1920s and this led
to the Town Plmming Act of 1926, its amendment in 1929 and, eventually, its
replacement by the Town and Country Planning Act in 1953.
The administration of these planning functions was largely the responsibility oflocal
government, but funding and planning priorities were still determined by central
government. The State's emphasis during this time was to reverse the economic
decline that was the result of the erosion of secure European markets for New
Zealand's agricultural products. Subsequently, economic goals were vigorously
pursued, often at the expense ofbio-physical environmental integrity. Buhrs and
Bartlett (1993, p. 90) noted that central government's involvement in the ownership,
allocation and management of resources led to a kind of 'State vandalism' which may
have helped address the trade deficit but did little for the state of the bio-physical
environment. Though the rubric of 'sustainability' might be relatively recent, finding
a balance between these two goals of economic growth and bio-physical
environmental well-being has a much longer pedigree. The tensions between the two
are illustrated rather very well in this excerpt from The Heron's Beach, written in
1923. .
One of the Chief problems of our time is the reconciliation of civilisation and the wild, of business and beauty. We have to overcome the extremists of both sides, those idealists who dwell in the clouds and those 'whole-hog' civilisers who would spoil everything that does not conduce to financial gain ... There is an ancient rural myth that one tiny part of every field or garden should be left untilled for the fairy people, who will not dwell
133
where spade or pruning hook have been. It seems as if there can be too much of culti vation and efficiency ... the brownies' portion should be well guarded. In a young country like this we have inherited riches that are not for our generation alone, but belong as fully to those who come after us. Hurst (1923), from 'The Heron's Beach' (in Lochhead, 1994, preamble).
Though New Zealand had an established tradition of conservation and preservation
(see Lochhead, 1994; Star and Lochhead, 2002), concerns for the environment were
popularised in the wake of specific logging, mining and electricity generation
projects, such as that built on Lake Manapouri in Fiordland which sparked the' Save
Manapouri' campaign (Wheen, 2002). Protests here in New Zealand around such
matters reflected an increasingly vocal international environmental movement that
had gained strength from various publications including Carson's Silent Spring
(1962), the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (Meadows and Meadows, 1974), and
Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973) which questioned blind adherence to
economic growth. Greenpeace started to make its presence felt, particularly in urban
areas.
Since 1984, a significant year for New Zealand, almost all aspects oflife in New
Zealand have experienced rapid change of an almost unprecedented nature. Some of
this occurred as a result of environmental lobbying and calls for greater public
participation in decision-making but more influential, however, were those demands
from the political right for conditions that favoured private enterprise, competition
and market efficiencies. Surprisingly, these calls had their most dramatic effect on the
'schizoid' Fourth Labour Government elected in 1984 (Ericksen, Berke, Crawford
and Dixon, 2003, p. 5). In contrast to the earlier era of central government-led 'Think
Big' projects designed to stimulate the economy, 1984 marked the beginnings
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massive restructuring and state withdrawal from the economic and social sectors. This
're-regulation', argued Le Heron and Pawson (1996, p. 5), was justified 'exclusively
by economic analysis and theory' based around increased competitiveness, the free
market and investor autonomy'. In the new, neo-liberal economy such measures as the
State's agricultural subsidies were reduced or abolished, impOli tariffs and other
protective measures were removed, competition was encouraged, and a far greater
emphasis was placed on individualism and private enterprise. It is within this context
that environmental lobbyists had to work.
The Resource Management Act (RMA) 1991
To facilitate private enterprise and free market economics within the confines ofbio
physical environmental limits, the State (under the new National Government of
1990) introduced a new, innovative piece oflegislation: The Resource Management
Act (1991). The 'effects-based' Resource Management Act replaced the more
prescriptive and interventionist 'activities-based' approach of the Town and Country
Planning Act (see also Wheen, 2002). The Resource Management Act has been called
effects-based because it is primarily concerned with managing the bio-physical
environmental consequences of activities rather than governing the activities
themselves. Within certain parameters so long as the bio-physical environmental
effects of an activity are 'no more than minor', that activity is permissible. Under the
Resource Management Act potential subdivisions, for example, need only meet
minimum size requirements and have a minimal effect on the environment. This is
very different from the Town and Country Planning Act where proposals for rural
subdivisions, for example, had to establish that the subdivision would be an
economically viable concern or an 'economic unit' and have the social impacts
135
assessed. As Jackson (1996, p. 173, emphasis added) noted in his chapter in the
Handbook of Environmental Law, 'in urban areas subdivision becomes a technical
matter, where the effects on amenities that follow subdivision can be carefully
controlled by conditions imposed upon subdivision,.37 This new flexibility was
supposed to reduce processing times and allow for increased innovation and
entrepreneurship and is consistent with the generally more liberal attitude expressed
by central government at the time.
The Resource Management Act simplified or eliminated more than 50 laws and 20
major statutes relating to the environment and is now the primary piece oflegislation
governing resource use and environmental management in both rural and urban areas.
The stated purpose of the Act 'is to promote the sustainable management of natural
and physical resources' where sustainable management is defined as:
Managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources in a way, or at a rate, which enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural well-being and for their health and safety while-
a) Sustaining the potential of natural and physical resources (excluding minerals) to meet the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations; and
b) Safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil, and ecosystems; and
c) Avoiding, remedying, or mitigating any adverse effects of activities on the environment (Part II, Section 5, The Resource Management Act, 1991).
Though a casual reading might suggest this wording to be reasonably explicit, there
have been numerous critiques of this definition. As Grundy (200) noted, it alludes to
the recommendations of the World Commission on Environment and Development
37 This book, and this chapter in particular, was reconunended to me by a platmer with the City Council.
136
around equity and distribution without giving a clear signal as to their exact role.
Likewise, the Treaty ofWaitangi is specified as needing to be taken into account
without clear instructions on how this should be achieved. Grundy points to a range of
interpretations of the Act, some of which indicate a need for the balancing of needs
versus an identification of bottom-lines. There are also 'nalTow' versus 'holistic'
interpretations (p. 69). Cocklin (1996) has pointed out that given these ambiguities
there was, and still is, plenty of scope for a range of interpretations and applications of
the Act. These contested meanings have been tested in the Environment Court and, as
a corollary, a body of case law now exists around the Act.
There are a number of agencies and authorities involved in the implementation of the
Act. The Ministry for the Environment and the Department of Conservation represent
central government, and the Office ofthe Parliamentary Commissioner for the
Environment constitutes an independent and often vocal organisation with an
environmental focus. Hands-on, day-to-day implementation ofthe Act, however, falls
mainly to regional, district and city councils. In terms of urban management, one of
the more significant consequences of the Act is the requirement that local authorities
prepare Regional, District or City Plans. While the Regional Plans tend to focus on
specific issues, such as coastal management or air quality, District and City Plans
establish policies and rules that the council will use to regulate resource use in their
areas of jurisdiction (Getting in on the Act, Ministry for the Environment, p.6). Under
the provisions of Section 75 of the Resource Management Act, local councils must
identify any significant resource management issues and objectives that relate to their
city, their reasons for adopting those objectives and policies, and the methods that will
be used to implement the policies (Christchurch City Plan, 1995, p.1). In effect, these
137
plans layout parameters which have been determined by assessments of the bio-
physical environment's capacity to support a given activity whether that be residential
subdivision or the location of commercial activities in residential areas and so on.
Proposals for rural and urban land use activities need resource consent and public
notification is required in cases where the proposed activity might have a 'more than
minor' effect on the environment, or might 'adversely affect' someone who hasn't
given their approval. Local authorities are responsible for the processing of resource
consents and they can also decide if the general public needs to be informed of the
proposal. If a proposal is publicly notified anyone may make a submission. This
addresses certain obligations around consultation and participation, but as only
approximately 5 per cent of all resource consent applications are publicly notified
(Getting in on the Act, Ministry for the Environment, p.7) the opportunities for public
input on new deVelopments are somewhat curtailed.
This effects-based approach to resource management is not without its detractors.
Freeman (2004, p. 311) pointed out that the Act:
offers no guidance on critical sustainability issues such as economic development, social development, justice and equity ... or even fundamental environmental issues such as energy generation and efficiency. Neither does it offer guidance on key planning issues such as forward and strategic planning. In fact, such issues are clearly barred from consideration in planning decisions, where the focus is on more precise land use matters, specifically the environmental effects on land, air and water.
This tendency to bypass these issues and more focused concerns, such as the siting of
community care facilities, has led to calls for the Resource Management Act to be
situated within broader socio-cultural considerations (Gleeson and Memon, 1997) and
138
for the Environment Court to resist the narrow interpretation of the Act favoured by
'New Right interest groups' (Memon, 2002, p. 299). Other critiques expose some of
the contradictory and fundamentally opposed interests that underpin the supposedly
neutral legislation (see Skelton and Memon, 2002). Some see the legislation as going
too far in protecting the environment at the expense ofthe economy, whilst others say
it does not go far enough and that it is largely toothless.38
Of particular relevance for my research is the criticism directed at the Act with
regards to its treatment of urban areas. Doeksen and Swaffield (1993, p. l33), for
example, pointed out that while the intellectual antecedents ofthe Act are obvious in
its title, its 'physical and locational scope is less clear' and that 'the greatest
concentrations of human activity in the environment - the town and the city - are all
but invisible'. Likewise, Perkins and Thoms (1999) also argued that 'Defining human
social and community life naturalistically, as part ofthe bio-physical environment, or
of ecosystems, is reductionist and ignores the significant social theoretical tenet that
cities are a significant product of human culture'. A report from the Office of the
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (1998) made a similar point. The
report stated that:
New Zealand faces some real challenges to the sustainability of urban ecosystems. These issues are much wider and cannot be properly addressed by generic environmental management approaches and the management of effects via the Resource Management Act 1991. There is a compelling need to focus on improving the efficiency of resource use and iritegrated management of the urban environment, with people and communities being recognised as core elements of that environment (1998, p. 4).
38 The stymied Meridian energy-generating hydro scheme for the Waitaki River and recent 'Save the Snails' from the miners furore in Tasman District are good examples of the former argument. The lack of prosecution and penalty in the face of demonstrable environmental damage provides good ammunition for the latter.
139
While the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment applauded the Resource
Management Act for recognising the 'importance of the goal of sustainability' his
report also pointed out that the Act makes it difficult to predict, manage and regulate
the cumulative effects of activities, particularly as they affect local residents in urban
areas. The Commissioner considered that input from residents and councils to be a
site of potential conflict because the 'intent of the Resource Management Act can be
thwarted by councillors and staff who ignore community preferences for resource
management' (Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, 1998, p.3). This
conflict can be exacerbated in urban areas because of propinquity and density. As a
result the Commissioner encourages readers ofthe report to consider a sustainable
urban development approach that involves 'integrating the requirements of
environmental management, social equity and economic opportunity into all decision
making' (in Hughes, 1999, p.8). The Commissioner conceded that this may not sit
well within the current political climate, however. The report points out that, in the
view ofthe European Commission Urban Environment Expert Group at least,
'Sustainable development will only happen if it is explicitly planned for. Market
forces or other unconscious and undirected phenomena cannot solve the serious
problems of sustainability' (Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, 1998,
p.32).
While some applaud this approach, others obviously see it as requiring too much
intervention from the state. In his report The Extent to which Regulatory Control of
Land Use is Justified Under the Resource Management Act, neo-liberal commentator
and advocate McShane (1998, p.49) maintained that:
The Act was intended to replace controls based on the notion that local councils should indulge in social and economic
140
planning, with controls which focused exclusively on environmental effects. In practice, District Plans continue to promote social and economic planning and many politicians and bureaucrats continue to insist that this is their right and proper duty.
According to McShane, certain clauses had been added into the Act in order 'to
remind councils and others that they should not unduly interfere with the operations
of the market which is the most efficient means of allocating resources' and he
condemns references to such things as 'aesthetic coherence' in Section 79(c) ofthe
Act because, in his view, this has 'done more to dilute and diffuse the environmental
focus of the legislation' (pAO). He believes that this has allowed councils to engage
in practices of undue interference and control.
This led to passionate and prolonged debate about what constitutes core business for
local government. As Nixon (a former senior planner with the Christchurch City
Council) pointed out, 'Councils have to come to terms with the reality that selecting
growth options on the basis of social and economic outcomes and grand visions of
what's best for the people, are past, certainly using the Resource Management Act
and District Plans as a vehicle' (1997, p.24; see also Perkins and Thoms, 2001).
While local authorities throughout New Zealand have interpreted and used the
Resource Management Act in a number of ways, often writing District and City Plans
with diverse emphases, in general, among New Zealand's larger urban local
authorities39 'social and economic planning considerations have la~gely been
relegated to the margins ofthe [district] plans, if they have been considered at all'
(Perkins and Thoms, 2001, p.650).
39 A possible exception is the Waitakere District Council which has tried to assimilate a range of issues within its Plan.
141
The Resource Management Act Amendment (2005)
Ericksen, Berke, Crawford and Dixon (2003) point to a number of reasons why the
Resource Management Act (1991) failed to deliver on its initial promise including, for
example, problems that arose from central government's implementation in terms of
capacity-building. As a result, councils were tom in their understanding and
application of 'sustainable development' and 'sustainable management', and in the
nature of their relationship with Maori. There was also a 'lack of policy direction' on
matters of national importance (ibid, p. 287). Lack of cooperation between regional
and local or city councils further complicated matters. The result of these factors was
a generally poor set of the plans that were a requirement of the Resource Management
Act. Much of the optimism from business and green interests that was directed at the
Act in its early stages dissipated in the face of continued environmental degradation _
and lengthy processing times for even the most basic of resource consent applications
(see, for example, Fisher, 2003 for a Business Roundtable perspective).
In 2004, the Government subsequently announced a review of the Act which was to
focus on ways of improving 'the quality of decisions and processes whilst not
compromising good environmental outcomes or public participation' (Ministry for the
Environment, 2006). More specifically, the review was concerned to get better and
faster decisions on resource consents; provide a means of working with councils when
decisions are too big for local decision-making as is sometimes the case in matters of
national importance; and provide more national leadership through policy statements
and standards.
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Among the standards are fourteen pertaining to air quality and a further series are
being developed around contaminated land, raw drinking water,
telecommunications, biosolids and land transport noise. The Ministry is also
preparing a set of policy statements directed towards biodiversity, electricity
transmission, and electricity generation. According to the Ministry's website,
these amendments 'provide for absolute standards to be set where appropriate,
ensuring consistency when this is required' (Ministry for the Environment, 2006).
Reactions to the Amendment have been less than favourable with the business
community continuing to be frustrated by lengthy processing times. Interest groups
concerned with protecting the environment are similarly frustrated by the apparent
subservience of the Act to business interests. At another level, little has changed with
regards to concerns about the Act and the urban environment and the continued focus
on the bio-physical environment in the Amendment is cause for concern. In short, it is
difficult to find members of the wider public openly applauding the Resource
Management Act Amendment.
The Local Government Act
Whilst central government has picked up on the consequences of the lack of a clear
vision around the Resource Management Act, the need for direction has to be
balanced against greater autonomy for local authorities. In order to implement the
Resource Management Act (1991), central government devolved responsibility to
local authorities and this, in part, provided the rationale for the amendment to the
Local Government Act in 1989. This Amendment empowered local authorities to
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oversee such diverse activities as allowing for trade to occur on a 'competitively
neutral basis', directing local services and facilities, the preparation of annual plans
and financial strategies; They are also responsible for recognising the 'identities and
values of different communities' as well as the 'definition and enforcement of
appropriate rights within those communities' (Parliamentary Commissioner for the
Environment, 1998, p.7). Territorial authorities are also called upon to provide the
means by which local people may participate in local government and local
government decisions.
Memon and Thomas, S. (2006) and Memon and Thomas, G. (2006) contend that these
reforms of the late 1980s were largely consistent with a neo-liberal political agenda,
whereas more recent reforms are more diverse in terms oftheir objectives. The most
important of these reforms was the Local Government Act Amendment of 2002 which
saw the inclusion of a clause to empower local authorities to respond to community
needs; a new focus on identifying and promoting social, cultural, economic and
environmental well-being and 'sustainable development'; and a requirement that councils
prepare and implement strategic 10-year community plans. This is supposed to encourage
greater public engagement with political processes at the local level.
One of the key tools in achieving these goals is the requirement for Long-term
Council Community Plans. The local authority's role is to facilitate community
identification of desired outcomes around social, cultural, economic and
environmental well-being. The council is then to report back to the community at least
once every three years outlining progress made towards these desired goals.
According to the City Council's website, the Long-term Council Community Plan is:
144
Our map and our guide on how the Council, as an organisation, contributes to a successful and sustainable future for Christchurch. It contains clear instructions from the Council [sic] elected members on how to run our City with a long-tenn focus.
It describes everything the Council does for the people and the environment of Christchurch (activities, services and capital works programme), and what it costs. It is essentially, the Council's' contract with the community' and therefore a record of the Council's intentions that the community can use to gauge the organisation's perfonnance and results.
It also provides a record of the Council's intentions which the community can use to gauge the organisation's perfonnance and results (ccc.govt.nz/LTCCP emphasis added).
The vision for Christchurch, as outlined in the Plan, centres round five themes: a place
where people enjoy living, a place of inclusive communities, a thriving, healthy
environment, the most attractive city in New Zealand, and a global economic
destination.
While the Plan therefore has the potential to off-set what some see as the strong bio-
physical environmental focus of the Resource Management Act40, Memon and
Thomas, S. (2006) and Memon and Thomas, G. (2006) question the extent to which
the purpose of the Local Government Act Amendment will be fulfilled. They point to
problems with the capability and commitment of not only local authorities, but also
central government and community agencies in achieving these goals. Furthennore,
and of particular relevance for my own work, although the Act adopts the World
Commission on Environment and Development's definition of sustainable
development, none of the difficulties associated with the concept that I have pointed
40 Whether this 'strong environmental focus' exists, or is strong enough, is contested and this plays a significant role in my research results and subsequent discussion.
145
to in earlier chapters are resolved. Though too strict a definition negates the purpose
of the sustainable development approach, which is to let local context inform the
operative meaning, the lack of clarity surrounding the term begs some kind of national
debate.
These difficulties combined point to hurdles which may severely impede
communities' abilities to implement their visions, particularly around diverse socio
cultural aspirations which do not necessarily sit well in the climate of standards and
'objective limits' established by the Resource Management Act and its amendment. It
is, furthermore, questionable whether certain commercial interests will support
attempts by local authorities to combine social and economic factors in their decision
making. Under a critique based around excessive council spending and profligacy it is_
likely that some business interests will resist strongly attempts by local authorities to
intervene in wider urban affairs.
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Chapter Six: Results - A Prelude
Some of the material in my methodology chapter, particularly Law's (2004) work
around multiplicity, methods assemblage and inscription devices, indicates a need for
an explanatory preamble to the results presented in the following chapters. If, as Law
contends (2004, p. 143), methods are performative in that they produce rather than
uncover realities, it become important - even necessary - to be explicit about some of
the conditions underpinning my own results. In this chapter I outline my research
approach and situate myself as part ofthe research process.
Multiplicity and Discourse
The idea of the method assemblage is Law's response to the idea of multiplicity
which, in tum, depends on a recognition that 'realities may change their shape or
become more or less definite' (Law, 2004, p. 14). This malleability was, for me,
clearly evident in results of my earlier work on infill housing which was considered
by some to be the most suitable way of achieving a sustainable urban form (as seen in
the compact city literature) but was, for others, the antithesis of both bio-physical
environmental well-being and established cultural preferences for lifestyles associated
with low-density living. People at both ends ofthis argument used the concept of
sustainability to justify their position. This research left me wondering how 'the truth'
around this topic had become so fluid.
Law's work alerted me to the idea that seeking the objective truth about urban
sustainability is no longer possible as an academic exercise, and this awareness raised
a whole new set of questions: If a true reality is not objectively available, nor does it
147
seem completely arbitrary. So what are the mechanisms by which we might identify
and evaluate these various strands of multiplicity? Law suggested that we achieve this
by attending to the' enactments of relations that make some things ... present "in
here" whilst making others absent "out-there'" (2004, p. 14).
The apparent arbitrariness of multiplicity is negated by various processes of
amplification clearly evident in the discourse surrounding urban sustainability. These
processes can be quantitative, as when constructs appear repeatedly in the data, thus
generating particular themes around which consensus or conflict can be identified. Or
they may be qualitative, signposted by tears, 'objectivity', hysterical laughter,
intensity, dogged and enduring determination, or exhibitions of fanaticism.
On the other hand, allegory, as Law noted, can alert us to what is absent, though, in
the case of my research, this absence was generally brought to my attention by
comparing the theory and practice of urban sustainability. What, for example, was the
place (if any) ofthe lived-in-ness of Thirds pace (Soja, 2000) in the Greater
Christchurch Urban Design Strategy? How do the three strands (social, economic and
bio-physical environmental) of orthodox definitions of sustainability come together in
the city (or don't they)?
Inscription Devices·
Inscription devices 'out there'
Latour and Woolgar's concept of inscription devices (see Law, 2004, pp. 19-24)
refers to the mechanisms, including machines, by which realities are constructed. In
terms of my own research, this is a useful idea on two levels. The first is to be aware
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of the apparatus, tools and equipment that practitioners use to advance their own
understanding of urban sustainability. These may include such things as pollution
monitors, or less 'scientific' but no less effective means of constructing realities;
observations like 'you used to be able to go out there any day and catch a fish, but not
any more ... ' The meter, the counter, the fish, the observer (along with their possible
deficiencies), and their place in the network that connects them, tend to melt away
leaving mere statement of fact.
The interview schedule
The second level at which the idea of the inscription device was useful pertained to
my own research approach. Whatever strategy I adopted would essentially 'make' my
results and I would like, therefore, to outline my method in brief. Because my aim
was to explore the interviewees' understanding of the term urban sustainability, it was
important that I did not constrain, influence or pre-empt their responses with my
questions or the order in which they were asked. In the introductory letter and/or
initial telephone contact I typically outlined my project as an investigation ofthe main
issues, opportunities and problems they, as urban practitioners, faced in their
professional capacity. The 35 practitioners I interviewed comprised architects,
Residents' Association Representatives, Regional and City Council employees
(including planners, community advocates and so on) and councillors, real estate
developers, and representatives of other local urban interest groups. I also interviewed
several prominent central government politicians and civil servants. Many of my
interviewees (CCC employees, architects, group housing representatives and so on)
played a part in the development of Christchurch's general urban form. In terms of
Resident's Association representatives, real estate developers, Councillors, however,
149
geography - the Southwest of Christchurch in particular - guided the selection
process. This allowed me to explore area-specific issues, such as the most appropriate
form of residential subdivision, traffic management, the use of recreation spaces and
the like, from different points of view.
If 'urban sustainability' was an important part of their agenda, I reasoned the
interviewees would likely introduce the topic in their own way. Though many of the
issues they raised could conceivably fall under the rubric of urban sustainability, after
three interviews none ofthe interviewees had explicitly used this term, nor had they
mentioned sustainability more generally. After these three interviews I began
introducing the term sustainability after the discussion of the main issues, and then I
would instigate a discussion on the concept of urban sustainability. Though I did
devise an interview schedule it was, more often than not, abandoned in favour of a
very flexible, opportunistic approach. This is consistent with Prus' advice that
ethnographic interviews be characterised by 'careful and receptive listening, open
ended queries, and extensive probing (1996, p.20).
Texts
Actual texts were also consulted: The Christchurch City Plan, The Southwest Area
Plan, the draft Long-term Council Community Plan, The Greater Christchurch Urban
Design Strategy, governmental and non-governmental publications. These included,
but were not limited to, those from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the
Environment, the Salvation Army, the Ministry for the Environment, the Ministry for
Social Development, the Chamber of Commerce, the Resource Management Law
Association, private research groups (such as Wendell-Cox consultancy, the New
150
Zealand Institute, the Centre for Housing Research Aoteroa New Zealand, the Centre
for Research, Evaluation and Social Assessment, etc), local authorities and numerous
other interest groups. 1 also spent time perusing various web sites and promotional
material, particularly that issued by the group housing companies. References to some
of these texts are included in my results, whilst others served to infonn my
understanding of a range of issues broadly associated with my topic.
The city
The city itself can also be viewed as a kind of 'text' of sorts; not in the sense that it
has an inherently fixed meaning that is uncovered, but rather as something to be
interpreted and understood by its inhabitants. The notion that the cityscape is open to
interpretation does not mean a random assortment of readings is likely, however, as
this would deny the intersubjectivity of urban experience. In this sense, the city is
perhaps better understood as an activity, or a perfonnance, in which we take part. The
products and processes associated with this perfonnance is readily available for
scrutiny, and in tenns of my study, include the physical fonn of the city itself and its
symbolic components as well as the activities themselves.
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Chapter Seven: The Invisible Urban
Of all my results, one of the more surprising and most difficult to document, was the
place of the urban prefix in urban sustainability. The urban aspect is interesting in that
it was generally neglected, often entirely, and it is this observation that underpins my
claim that this result was most difficult to document. As Law (2004) contends this is
not necessarily a methodological failure, however; its intractable absence is actually
very significant. Despite a growing number of publications and burgeoning literature
devoted to urban sustainability, only two interviewees mentioned sustainability before
I did (or rather, they referred to unsustainable practices) and none of the participants
were first to use the term urban sustainability. Convinced that this absence of data
was data in itself, I was alerted to the ways in which the city itself was constructed, in
both a figurative and literal sense.
As outlined in the previous chapter, I generally began each interview by asking the
interviewee about the main issues they thought the city (in relation to their profession)
was facing. This generated discussion around a wide range of concerns; some of the
more common were water quality and the state ofthe aquifers that naturally filter
Christchurch's water, infill housing, greenfield development at the urban periphery
and urban sprawl, new legislation affecting their practice, recreation facilities, funding
for services and increased competition. 'Urban sustainability' was never used as a
catch-all phrase for a combination of these issues, though depending on which
definition one adopts, all of them could conceivably fall under this rubric.
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The Least Sexy of Terms
If urban sustainability was never used, sustainability and sustainable development
also suffered a similar neglect. In fact, the term was rarely invoked at all unless I
introduced the term. The exceptions to this trend were members of two different urban
interest groups who used the tenn with some regularity to describe unsustainable
practices. The infrequent use of these terms could be due to a number of factors. In
one instance, a prominent central government politician told me:
I personally hate the label sustainabilityand it's not because of what it means. Ijust think it's a name that hasn't been taken up by the community and because of that it becomes like a mantra of some people onto other people. It's not something owned by the community and yet the concept behind it I love .... I love it because ... Well parts are very frustrating and it's one of the most thoughtful jobs I've ever had and secondly it's not full of short sexy answers. It's actually quite a lot of weighing up. But you have to be smart enough to take people along with you. So you have to feed people stories or feed them ... Start changing the mind set and that's why I hate to use the word sustainability. Because it's the least sexy term I have ever come across in my life. They don't even think it's about tree huggers. It doesn't even have that warmth to it. It's just a very cold term.
This politician was not the only one to dismiss the term as some kind of' label'. Other
interviewees dismissed it as 'a jargony word' that means very little (community
advocate, CCC) or a 'boat' that the Christchurch City Council happened to be riding
at the moment (real estate developer). Residents' Association representatives were, in
general, most dismissive of the word, and my use of the term often prompted almost
disgusted snorts or eye-rolling. These reactions are discussed in more detail later, but
- . .
for now I would simply like to establish that although my readings of secondary data
sources indicate that sustainability is an almost necessary component of funding or
resource consent applications and promotional material, it did not appear to be a term
used in everyday practice among these practitioners.
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The City as the Antithesis of Nature
The interviewees were even less enthusiastic, knowledgeable or willing to engage
with the urban prefix to sustainability. Only one interviewee from the Ministry for the
Environment spoke with confidence and clarity about what might be called the urban
in the sense Soja uses whereby proximal relations, dependencies and creativities are
important. Indeed, the most common reaction was to ignore the urban altogether in
favour of more focussed versions of sustainability associated with the bio-physical
environment. The following excerpt from an interview with a former Christchurch
local body politician is a good example that aptly demonstrates how sustainability is
frequently divorced from the urban, even when the previous discussion was firmly
centred on city functions and features, such as urban community facilities:
Politician: Well I think it [Riccarton Racecourse] is a beautiful piece ofland. We've got that wonderful market there on a Sunday. And if we do get this teahouse it will be a wonderful community facility. So I want the residents around the area to take a bit more of an interest in it. .. I hope they get as passionate about it and think about it as everything else. It's as important as the Port Hills. And this teahouse for me is a national icon to horse racing. Because it's the only one left. Interviewer: One of the things that I hear a lot about at university is urban sustainability ... [3 second pause]. Does that mean anything to you? Politician: You know, I was born in Dunedin and we had a bach at Karitane, a crib [holiday home] as you call them down south. And you'd go over the fields with the dogs and have fun in the paddocks and ... Kids today don't have that. .. wonderful experience of roaming around in the ... environment like I did as a child. And I think that that's quite sad. And I believe that sustainability also means keeping our waters. Looking after our waterways and seeing that our aquifers are full. Wonderful filters. And so we have to look after it. So to me that means sustainability.
These sorts of comments illustrated that one of the systems of rules, to use
Fairclough's (1995) tenns, operating within the urban sustainability discourse was a
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tendency to associate it with a model that is most closely aligned with 'nature' and
'the environment' and where the community and civic dynamics we had been
discussing were discounted as lying outside the scope of this concept.
This division between town and country had two somewhat contradictory effects. As
this next excerpt from an interview with a central government politician demonstrates,
the ways in which going out into 'the environment' can inspire people to act in more
eco-friendly ways:
Suzanne: You said something interesting about people going and seeing weedy bits on the edge of the lake. It brings me to my urban question because in the urban environment we're kind of ... Well, what is urban sustainability? Politician: Well, people have got a huge problem on this issue. Let me tell you what happens in the life of a Minister for conservation of the environment. We get huge numbers of letters flooding in in January and February [the New Zealand summer months]. Because people from the towns go to the country and they all want it kept pristine out there in their favourite bays. They all want it kept. .. I do not believe that the hair shirt brigade is actually working. In fact it's antagonising when they say 'the end of the world is nigh' .... Get stuffed. But people do go out to the countryside and they write these letters to us because the places they love are not as lovely as they used to be. So that drives a change and that is the edge on which we start driving some changes about energy and water and waste in our everyday behaviour in our homes.
While inspiring people to change their environmental practices is the first effect of a
rural/urban dichotomy, such positive change can only occur if people make the
necessary connections between adver~e bio-physical environmental effects and their
own behaviour once they are back in the urban setting. This leads to the second,
somewhat contradictory effect where establishing sustainability as something that
happens 'out there' in the so-called pristine natural environment can make the
fOlmation of these associations more difficult. The Minister was aware ofthis:
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So they want those things kept [but] they come back in here and they use electricity like you wouldn't believe and water like you wouldn't believe. Belch stuffup into the air and don't think it has any consequences and then complain about violence in the city and ... Let alone dreadful things around transport ...
This contradiction is part of a complex that was left largely unaddressed by the
interviewees. This is because many ofthe interviewees were not in a position to be
able comment on this fairly subtle aspect of my research question. There were several
exceptions, however. Another well-placed, well-infonned observer at the Ministry for
the Environment, for example, had this to say about the rural-urban dichotomy:
There's another fascinating problem that affects us in our current society, which you don't tend to get in simpler societies, and that is that the feedback mechanisms that tell us when we've messed up aren't direct anymore. So if you're a Maori tribe living in this country 300 years ago and you mess up your environment, you're dead. And you learn fast. That feedback loop creates a ... My family comes from a fanning background and they understand this. They see life and death and lambs and see those feedback loops and they know where food comes from. They watch it running around, they kill it and so on. And they know the consequences of getting it wrong and planting the wrong crops and those sorts of things. But in cities you don't get any ofthat anymore. Your food comes through a transaction that is electronic now from aisles in a supennarket where you get the choice. You've no idea where it comes from. You don't care. You rely on the labelling to tell you whether it's edible or not. So I think that the average person doesn't get the messages about the effects they have on the environment, except very local ones, and then only ifthey watch for them. And that's why you have this complete misunderstanding and disinterest in things like climate change and whatever because people can't conceive of it. Where is the problem? So again, cities have this fascinating dualism to them where on the one hand being creative exciting places and on the other hand being real risks.
Thus, these data already hint at a number of problems with the idea of urban
sustainability. First, cities are simply not seen as being relevant to sustainability when
it is constructed as something that happens 'out there'. The creation of this rural/urban
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dichotomy generates contradictory effects where the 'natural environment' can inspire
positive change, yet the city itself creates an insular shell that prevents urban
inhabitants from being aware of wider bio-physical environmental problems. A
similar charge could possibly be directed at this urban exoskeleton's ability to
manufacture actual and conceptual distance that covers up social concerns as well,
though none of the interviewees made this claim.
The interviews also suggested yet a third problem, and, again, this pertains most
obviously to bio-physical environmental sustainability: In some cases, not only was
the city discounted as a site or condition of sustainability, it was actually set up as its
antithesis. This was made most clear in those accounts of urban sprawl where the city
was seen to be encroaching on some idealised version of more sustainable rural
environments. This is implicit in the local body politician's quotation (above) where
sustainability is somehow tied to roaming the fields and paddocks with a dog or two,
but this anti-urban sentiment was also expressed more explicitly. This was particularly
the case in interviews where urban sprawl was seen as a concern. One architect, for
example, described the suburbs as an 'evil' spawned by 'a culture wanting its own
piece of dirt'. He saw this as consuming the orchards and farms at the urban
periphery, sucking in satellite towns and villages and described this process as
'unsustainable'. This is somewhat ironic given these types of rural environments, with
their heavy use of fertilisers, effluent run-off, or use of weedkillers which can b~ as
damaging as any urban product or practice. This irony was never raised during
interviews.
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Urban Sustainability or Sustainable Cities
If ignoring the urban altogether or treating it as antithetical to more sustainable rural
environments were two responses, another was to treat the city as a physically
bounded location rather than a condition. It is implicit in the quotation above where
people' go out to the countryside' but it was also evident in those interviews where
technical solutions to problems surrounding urban sustainability were the focus, such
as waste disposal, curbing urban sprawl through 'containment' or 'consolidation'
policies such as the preservation of a greenbelt, or water use. This marks a distinct
tum away from plmming orthodoxies of early last century where the wider urban
environment, of which its physical form was but one part, was explicitly connected to
social conditions and remedies (see, for example Malcom Mason's comment in
Chapter Five). In some accounts, our contemporary neglect of the urban as a
condition was seen as having been actively promoted by central government. One
planner from the City Council told me:
When the Regional Council did its policy statement back in the early 1990s and started out having a chapter on the built environment the Ministry for the Environment said 'no you don't have to have a chapter like that because if you get your policies on the topics right, then the urban environment will take care of itself. And what they were saying was that if your water policies were right and the air policies were right, and transport and all those things were based on sustainable management principles, then you don't have to intervene in urban areas.
Several recent central government publications and documents have since sought to
revise this orientation to some extent41, however, the interviews with pla1lliers clearly
showed that the legacy ofthis strong anti-interventionist, anti-urban stance that
41 Urban Sustainability in New Zealand (2003); The New Zealand Urban Design Protocol (2005) including the Action Pack (2005), A Summary of the Value of Urban Design (2005) and Urban Design Case Studies (2005)
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dominated the 1990s is still having a significant effect on current urban planning
practice.
There was a sense that the only issues that should rightfully be addressed by the City
Council are limited to air, water and energy policies whereas social and economic
affairs are best left to the market. In fact, there was a strong suggestion that even
fairly nominal attempts to address social concerns should be regarded with caution or
even suspicion, and were labelled 'social engineering' by planners on more than one
occasion. The following excerpt from an interview with a City Council planner was
typical:
It also gets back to whose values you're trying to promote if you're a planner. Which part of society is going to benefit from your decisions and that sort of thing. When I say that's to do with planning, it's a very dangerous area to get into if you're going to start engineering society and trying to tell people what's good for them and what values they should aspire to. I think the urbanists are guilty of trying to socially engineer. They're trying to tell people that mixed-use and high-density are good for them.
Ironically, in some cases, these accusations of social engineering has actively
prevented the City Council from adopting the kinds of strategies, such as branding,
place promotion and covenants, that have been used to such good effect by private
interests.42 While the extremely cautious attitude with regards to intervention might
suit certain private interests very well, it explicitly rejects seeing the urban as a
condition and emphasises the city as a-site in which-slistainability, iIi a fairly limited
42 My use of the tenn 'good effect' here is based solely on the results of a Christchurch City Council census of recent greenfield subdivision residents where the responses were overwhelmingly favourable. Furthennore, the response rate of approximately 70 per cent is well above average (typically such surveys yield a response rate of about 30 per cent). Though there are many ways in which these subdivisions, many of which are symbolically gated or semi-gated, could be seen as inequitable and exclusive, the inhabitants were generally very satisfied with their new homes. The City Council's report is still in its draft stages and is as yet unavailable.
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bio-physical environmental sense, might be achieved. It is this that forms the basis of
my distinction between urban sustainability (which acknowledges the urban as a
condition) and sustainable cities (which focuses on the city as a location).
The Country and the Town: A Natural Relationship?
To summarise, in following Law (2004) it is important to recognise that a paucity, or
even absence, of data is still data. The lack of reference by the interviewees to urban
sustainability is thus very revealing, indicating the urban prefix is not well
understood, or is not seen as important, by many of my respondents in this study. This
is an important result in terms of my study of urban sustainability. A second result is
that while there was some evidence of an awareness and understanding of
sustainability more generally, there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the term. While
it certainly has its place in promotional material and research funding applications, it
has largely failed to grasp the imagination of these practitioners in everyday practice.
Third, urban sustainability suffers even more than general sustainability in this regard
as it is seen as something of an oxymoron where cities are posited as the antithesis of
sustainability. Importantly, the very nature of the city accentuates this dichotomy as it
shelters its inhabitants from the bio-physical environmental and social effects of their
actions. Fourth, when sustainability is used in conjunction with the urban, it tends to
highlight the role of 'nature' or more specifically, 'natural resources' in the city, such
as air, water and energy and this approach inevitably employs spatial accounts of
cities that are based on size, administrative function or physical characteristics that
emphasise the city as a location. This approach, then, should perhaps best be
described as building a sustainable city or sustainable urban form rather than urban
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sustainability which, to my mind, invokes a more holistic view of the city, including
its character, its history, its people and their aspirations, its economy and its bio
physical environment.
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Chapter Eight: Multiplicity, Singularity and Defining Urban Sustainability
The sheer ubiquity of derivati ves of the term 'sustainability' in promotional material,
official documents, legislation and legal proceedings and, increasingly, everyday use,
gives the appearance that the tel111 is fairly straightforward, accessible and singular.
This is particularly obvious in the official material where urban sustainabiIity and
sustainable development are presented as meaningful and unproblematic concepts. In
fact, if we relied solely on such literature we would be comforted by an apparent
consensus that we do actually know what sustainability means even though we may
have some difficulties articulating an exact definition. Yet, this consensus is illusory
as I outlined in Chapter Three; it is fraught with ambiguity, and it is difficult to
operationalise and implement. As a corollary of this curious divergence, my task is
not so much to define urban sustainability but to investigate how and why such an
ambiguous and slippery term is employed with such frequency by an increasingly
diverse group of individuals and organisations.
Law (2004) raised an interesting point regarding what we might call observations; that
we also have to be sensitive to what is not there. In this vein, one of my results is that
the use of the term sustainability appears to be largely confined to particular policy
and social spaces such as policy documents, legislation, government publications,
websites, promotional material, Environment Court proceedings and funding or
resource consent applications. It is not there in everyday practice. The results outlined
in the previous chapter led me to proffer one reason for this; it has been called the
'least sexy' ofterms, and is one that has failed to grasp the popular imagination. My
research participants saw it as faddish or just another piece of jargon that you have to
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use in your reports or resource consent applications. While this points to a curious
disjuncture between the different spaces of practice, I will now explore a number of
additional reasons why urban sustainability and sustainability more generally are not
used so often in everyday practice.
The Slippery Concept of Urban Sustain ability
Having talked with my research participants about the main issues confronting the
city, I then asked them if they had heard of sustainability (or, later, urban
sustainability) and whether it meant anything to them. This inspired a range of more
or less coherent definitions. In some cases it was clear that 'sustainability' was being
used in a manner consistent with what might be called an everyday understanding that
was synonymous with maintaining, prolonging or protracting certain processes or
trends. One group housing representative, for example, responded to my question in
the following way:
Suzanne: I have heard a bit in academic circles about sustainability. Does that come in to your work at all? Group housing representative: Sustainability? ... Well we're on a roller coaster at the moment. It won't carry on. We might have a rule of thumb that we might stretch this little roll out for another 18 months or a couple of years. It's well known that the builders are the first to suffer and the last to recover like the building industry as a whole because interest rates affect us badly.
In this case, further conversation made it clear that this interviewee thought
sustainability meant prolonging the building boom New Zealand has been
experiencing since 2002. He was a good example of a relatively small number of
interviewees who appeared completely oblivious to the policy discourse surrounding
sustainability and were unaware of its bio-physical connotations a la Brundtland. This
is interesting given that this interviewee, as a group housing representative, is part of a
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subset of people whom the central government hopes, or seems to expect, would have
a reasonable understanding of the concept. This extract shows that although the terms
sustainability and urban sustainability are ubiquitous in certain policy spaces and
academic circles, they are not necessarily well understood by those who have a
significant role to play in shaping the physical fOfll1 of our cities and towns.
A further, very different, definition offers another clue as to why the concept of urban
sustainability is not used more frequently in everyday practice and this next quotation
represents the position of those who believed the tenn unduly complicated a rather
straightforward idea:
Suzanne: I'm looking at urban sustainability. Real estate developer: That's good. Suzanne: Does it mean anything to you? Real estate developer: It means to me that we shouldn't be hampering growth or interfering in markets unless there's good reason to do so. And I'm not hostile to a sound regulatory framework, in fact I'd encourage that, but I think we still have a long way to go to getting that here in New Zealand. Not only in New Zealand. It's a problem throughout the world.
This particular interviewee was aware of the confusion surrounding definitions of
sustainability but was adamant that the solution was a very straightforward matter of
encouraging economic growth. Further conversation clarified his view that bio-
physical environmental and social concerns could only be addressed effectively by
pursuing this model. Social inequities were to be resolved by 'making them [the poor]
richer' and bio-physical environmental concerns would become irreievant once the
appropriate limits had been identified. In fact, one interviewee denied the existence of
some bio-physical environmental problems altogether, suggesting that global
warming, for example, should be dismissed as a 'greenie conspiracy'. In this view,
urban sustainability is not used because it is associated with social and bio-physical
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environmental affairs that are, in their view, dubious, confusing or irrelevant. This
point of view is largely consistent with that ofthe ecological modernisers who
understand sustainability to be achievable within the confines of existing systems and
structures.
Both the literature and my interviews identified an opposing discourse to that of the
ecological modernisers, one that centres on an awareness of the ways in which
sustainability depends on appropriate responses to self-induced threats and risks. In
complete contrast to the ecological modernisers' position, which involves a mere
tweaking of the current growth model, those interviewees I identified as adherents of
the risk model generally proposed far more widespread and radical changes. The
interviews showed that more pervasive changes were required because of the
interconnectedness of social, bio-physical and economic dimensions, yet here, too, the
talk was dominated by references to unsustainable practices rather than sustainability.
The scarcity of references to sustainability from this group seemed to stem from the
overwhelming complexity involved in balancing the multitude of elements present in
their version of the concept. This complexity was evident in the definitions they
offered of the term where it was not uncommon to hear rather vague, circuitous,
rambling or tautological accounts. The following is a fairly typical example:
Suzanne: Have you heard this word sustainability? Residents' Association representative: Yes. Often. I've been to courses in town on it. Yes. Suzanne: So what does it mean to you? Residents' Association representative: What it means is that a .... a ... an area ... offorest, in land use, doesn't matter what it is, whether it's water, timber, soil, whether it's social structure, infrastructure, whether it's what - it all amounts to the same thing. That what you put in place doesn't interfere with the natural course of events so that the actual land and its use becomes unsustainable. Does that help?
165
This is a very good example of the ways in which interviewees could be clear about
what was unsustainable, whilst being stricken by the messiness, the complexity, and
the enonnity of defining what was sustainable.
One of the most common ways of coping with the complexity of more expansive
definitions of urban sustainability was to separate and reduce the issue to its more
simple components. This was made obvious to me in an interview with a member of
the City Council's planning team where I was told:
Planning team member: Well, the first step [in dealing with urban sustainability] is doing a planning course or getting a conceptual framework or theory of how society and cities work. Now, it's only a theory and it could be wrong but where it might be saying an urban area is a system, a complex social system or economic system and environmental system, at least it resolves complex problems down into things which you can at least comprehend. And then you are able, through that, to identify issues. [Emphasis added]
The one area where the concepts of urban sustainability (or rather, sustainable cities)
and sustainability were most likely to be confined was to the bio-physical
environment. Definitions of urban sustainability that were limited to aspects of the
bio-physical environment tended to be clearer and more succinct. These definitions
were often accompanied by really good, clear examples of particular activities and
processes that were relatively easy to understand and implement. The following are
just two examples of this:
Architect: Well everyone's got a different answer. When I'm asked that I say 'You need to define it', which is just bouncing around. The classic answer is in producing a house with little or no impact on the resources and the environmental benefits that are going to be enjoyed by future generations.
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Businessman: Well I corne from farming where sustainability is so vitally important. And it comes down to recycling your rubbish and all that sort of thing.
Definitions in this vein tended to have a narrow focus and were confined to quite
particular activities with easily implemented solutions, such as recycling. This
strategy was employed with regards to even very complex entities such as the city
itself. This was illustrated very well by one City Council employee who, when asked
to elaborate on his version of urban sustainability, devoted his entire 10 minute
explanation to the topic of waste water drainage.
Whether it is intentional or not, the Ministry for the Environment has helped to
formalise the notion of sustainability as weak ecological modernisation based on
technological innovation and limited bio-physical environmental measures in a range
of its publications. One of these is a guide for industry called Simply Sustainable
(Ministry for the Environment, 2005a, p. 2) whose opening pages state that
'sustainability actually ties in with what are generally considered to be 'sound'
business practices, such as ... minimising waste and maximising resources'. The guide
advocates such 'radical' changes as 'green[ing] your office stationary' and
'choos[ing] energy efficient equipment and appliances' (Ministry for the
Environment, 2005a, p.ll). This is hardly a robust critique of, or comprehensive set
of solutions to, deleterious business practice from our key environmental advocate;
what it does do, however, is help legitimise sustainability as a limited bio-physical
environmental concern.
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The Birds, the Bees and Sustainability43
I began this chapter with the claim that despite widespread use in policy documents,
official publications, resource consent applications and the like, terms like urban
sustainability and sustainability more generally have not necessarily gained CUlTency
in everyday practice. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Sometimes the
tenn was used in an everyday sort of way, synonymous with maintaining or
prolonging processes or activities, such as the building boom. Others did not use the
tenn because it was sullied by unnecessary and complicated social connotations when
the matter was a straightforward one of economic growth constrained only by non-
controversial bio-physical environmental limits. Those who did understand the term
to be a complex of social, economic and bio-physical environmental concerns often
had trouble when pressed to define it, largely because the steps necessary to
implement it were both radical and all-pervasive. Those who adopted more simplistic
definitions that focussed almost exclusively on the bio-physical environmental aspects
were easily able to offer definitions and appropriate means of implementation;
sustainability is a simple matter of recycling and taking public transport. The issue
that these various definitions and prescriptions raise in terms of the literature is
whether they can be kept separate and singular, whether it is merely a matter of
perspective, or whether these understandings of urban sustainability clash, interact
and interfere with each other. This is a question that will be discussed in Chapter
Eleven.
43 'A bird's eye view' refers to a singular, distanced and presumably all-encompassing vision of an otherwise elusive reality ... A bee's eye, on the other hand, has over eight thousand hexagonal lenses all oriented in a slightly different direction giving multiple perspectives on the same picture.
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Chapter Nine: The Bio-physical Environmental Discourse and a Technocratic Approach to Urban Sustainability
Scattered amongst the results so far have been oblique references to the importance of
the bio-physical environmental aspects of urban sustainability. Allusions to the bio-
physical environment, though often ill-informed or vague, were a consistent part of
the discourse surrounding urban sustainability. These results focus on the actors and
institutions, functions and processes that both support and are supported by particular
readings of urban sustainability. Primary among these is what I call a technocratic
discourse that the focus on the bio-physical environmental aspects of sustainability
makes possible and actively supports.
Urban Sustain ability as Technical Process
Having completed a Masters degree involving a study of Christchurch residents'
reactions to infill housing, one of the features I found most startling about the urban
sustainability discourse was the widespread separation ofbio-physical environmental
and social factors. My previous studies had shown the two to be intimately connected
as the policies aimed at the containment of urban sprawl, the preservation of
ecosystems and so on, reverberated in everyday life in unexpected and often
unwelcome ways. Sensitised to these links, I was surprised at how often, and to what
extent, the urban practitioners I interviewed divorced these two spaces. Two ways in
which this separation occurred was by situating particular constructs of nature outside
the city and by exaggerating the differences between the two. Importantly, this
separation ofthe urban and the bio-physical environment was also evident in policy
and practice directed towards the city itself.
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A number of interviewees made it clear that, in terms of urban sustainability, the city
was less a place for people to live and more of a bio-physical environmental problem
in need of 'technical' solutions. I use the word 'technical' deliberately here in order to
both emphasise the stripping back of the city to its physical components, and to
highlight the role particular kinds of knowledge play in the urban sustainability
discourse. The following excerpt from an interview with a member of the City
Council's planning team is a good example ofthis technical talk:
Suzanne: What would a sustainable city be like? Planning team member: Um ... A sustainable city? I don't know what it would look like but I know what it would have to do. It would have to be virtually closed loop on things like toxins. We would have to work out what level the environment would reasonably sustain. And make sure we didn't exceed that. At the moment it's being grossly exceeded. Suzanne: How would we know what that level was? Planning team member: We have to do a lot of research. We know that x level of toxins has an effect on y species and we do know a lot about that sort of thing. We need to find cleaner ways of doing things. It wouldn't necessarily need to generate its own energy but it would have to ensure that the energy that it did generate in some remote location didn't have adverse effects on the environment. A sustainable city would be more compact. New Zealand cities are pretty sprawly which encourages the use of the motor vehicle. And that encourages C02 emissions. On a wider scale it uses more resources in general like for rubber for tyres or energy to produce cars.
It is interesting to note the transition from the sustainable city being a particular way
to doing particular things, and importantly, it is the city itself rather than its
inhabitants "that perform such functions as closing the loop on toxins. It is also worth
noting how, in this discourse, it is the environment that has limits and that these are
merely uncovered by our research rather than made by it. There is very little room in
this technical definition of a sustainable city to suggest that active, living, real people
actually have a role in urban areas. In simple terms, the effect of this discourse is to
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remove people and socio-economic processes from the urban sustainability concept
altogether.
This tendency was evident in many of the interviews, and it is also clear in much of
the infonnation, publications and policy choices I reviewed dUling the course of my
research. The emphasis on numbers, densities and technical infonnation is obvious in,
for example, much of the discussion and official material pertaining to the Greater
Christchurch Urban Design Strategy. In just one case, in April 2005, the five-council
cooperative and Transit New Zealand released the Greater Christchurch Urban
Development Strategy (So many options ... which will you choose?) booklet outlining
growth strategy options. As outlined in Chapter Five, this was the result of an attempt
by the collective to collaborate over future growth in Canterbury. The opening
paragraph (p. 2) infonns us:
Every month 400 more people make Greater Christchurch their home. That's in addition to the 380,000 people who already live here. By 2021, 430,000 people will live here and around 500,000 could make the Greater Christchurch area their home by about 2041.
Following the contents page, under the heading The Place We Call Home .. . we are
greeted with the infonnation presented in Figure 14 (page 171).
Whilst the language used suggests that the authors of the document clearly intended
their work to be accessible and easily understood, the abundance of statistics and
figures in the document do not always have this effect, as I witnessed in at a meeting
of community leaders where the four options were being discussed. A central part of
the problem appeared to be the incongruity of the statistical picture painted in the
figure above with the kinds of issues identified as important in the Christchurch City
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Council's Residents' Satisfaction and Quality of Life Surveys (Christchurch City
Council, 2005), such as feeling happy and healthy, feeling safe in the home after dark,
and being proud of the city. Indeed, throughout this document, much of the
complexity of urban life is stripped back to a relatively simple evaluation of
population, densities, acreage, hazards and financial costs. Even the nebulous
'community identity' is reduced, at least in part, to a question of physical housing
forms. Thus, there are still very strong remnants of that early 1990s thinking
identified by the council planner whereby if roads, water, zoning and so on are taken
care of, communities, safety, equity, financial opportunities, etc. will take care of
themselves and that planning the future of the city is very much a technical question
directed towards the bio-physical environment.
Figure 14: The Place We Call Home: An Excerpt from the Greater Christchurch Urban Development Strategy.
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Institutionalising a Technocratic Approach to Urban Sustain ability
At times it was obvious that people's passion for protecting nature and the
environment was the driving force of their focus on technical bio-physical
environmental approaches to urban sustainability. These interviewees were fervent
advocates of environmental restoration and protection and spoke enthusiastically of
their personal habits and preferences for recycling, organic food, public transport and
so on. In other cases, however, the focus on the bio-physical environmental aspects of
sustainability seemed more a default position generated by the lack of clarity around
wider urban processes and institutions, some of which (the Resource Management Act
and the Environment Court) are particular to New Zealand's legal framework. The
practical implications of these two institutions deserve more attention as they play
such an important role in the building (both physically and mentally) of our cities and-
towns.
There were certainly a range of reactions to both the Resource Management Act and
the Environment Court, but one ofthe more readily identified was a frustration over
how to reconcile the various elements of the Act with the demands of legal process.
The following quotation from an interview with a Regional Councillor is lengthy, but
it is useful in illustrating how practitioners struggle with the different aspects of the
Act and how, by default, the bio-physical environment and technical approaches to
urban management emerge-as the most appropriate focus of action:
The [regional] councillors are creatures of statute in the sense that what they can and can't do is dictated very much by law ... particularly the RMA. So if I want to think about issues like intergenerational equity, I have to think about it in terms of the RMA. The RMA bothers me about that. Because I was taught that in a democracy like ours parliament proposes and the courts dispose ... So what legislators should do is write a principle which can then be subject to tests in particular circumstances ... So if I
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go to the RMA and I look at the bit that talks about sustaining the life-giving capacity of air, water and ecosystems and so on and I ask how I can do that. .. And if I look at the part of the Act right next to that which talks about future generations and I ask how I am to do that, I have to say about those two pieces of the Act, frankly, I'm damned if I know. When I'm trying to decide on an issue 'yes', 'no' or 'yes with conditions', what's the test? At that point I say the Act is not actually a principle but an ethic. And it's an ethic to which I might subscribe but as a creature of statute called a councillor I don't know how to work with it. But right after that I come to a thing which says I have an obligation to avoid, remedy or mitigate the effects of my actions on natural and physical resources. Then my eyes open wide and I say 'here is a test'. That I can do. I can say this proposed activity is or is not likely to generate adverse effects. I can avoid, remedy or mitigate those effects [of that activity]. So the only one of these three related things in the Act which I think has any meaning to a creature of statute is that third one ... That's the bit I can see makes sense in terms of what I understand the law to be and I understand the decision-making process in relation to the law to be.
As New Zealand's wider environment becomes increasingly litigious, it becomes all
the more important to make 'accountable' decisions supported by the appropriate
evidence. Given the ambiguities of the Act with regards to socio-cultural goals, it is
little wonder that the bio-physical environmental aspects of the city are considered to
be the safer and more certain option. While other actions directed at socio-economic
goals might be defensible, they are certainly less robust in terms of tangible evidence
and are subsequently more open to challenge. Because they are not justified clearly in
the legislation, in subtle, but profoundly powerful ways, institutions like the Resource
Management Act actually normalise the neglect of wider urban processes and
functions.
Consequently, other forms of knowing are seen as less valuable and carry less weight.
There was, for example, a great deal of talk from Residents' Association
representatives about the lack of credibility they have with the local authorities and in
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the Environment Court. As laypeople, they are not qualified to testify as 'expert'
witnesses and they often have to go to extreme, and expensive, lengths to have their
views heard in this forum. That only scientific or technical rationales are seen as
legitimate has filtered out of the Court into more prosaic forms of dialogue between
the Councils and urban interest groups or citizens. This was demonstrated to me in an
interview with a Residents' Association representative. In this example, the
calculations of professionals were elevated over the eye-witness accounts of residents
who were concerned about flooding and drainage in their neighbourhood:
As far as land use and the technology used to build buildings now, with earthquakes and so on, it's highly technical. And when they put in sections, they put down bores to find out where the water table is, they get a lot of argy bargy, they sit there for hours with their algebra and work it all out. But why don't they [the local authorities] come out here and have a look after the rain and just see what happens.
This particular quotation highlights sustainability as a highly technical process
involving abstract forms of knowledge and calculations beyond the realm of the
layperson, and even beyond most professionals who then have to hire expert
consultants to translate everyday concerns into an acceptable format. 44
This situation becomes more serious when one considers the extended reach of the
Resource Management Act and the Environment Court in the affairs of the city. It is
too early to make general statements about the effects of the requirement for the Long
Term Council Community Plans but it is possible to comment on the ways in which
the effects of the Resource Management Act permeate the obvious and more subtle
features of urban living via this technical discourse. The most obvious (though not the
44 This has interesting parallels with the distinction that appears to exist between the sustainable city as an ecosystem and urban
sustainability as a dynamic condition unfolding in the quotidian.
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only) example from my research is the case of one interviewee who described how
her Residents' Association had to translate its desire for low-density living into an
argument that further residential development would have some kind of adverse
environmental effect. She told me:
And so we decided to go to the Environment Court and we had to have a planners' evidence, landscapers' evidence, recreational experts' evidence and we had to have about 4 or 5 experts. Mr P from Lincoln University gave evidence on transport because energy is an impOltant thing in the Act and so we got him to say it's not energy efficient out here in tenns of getting people into town. We pointed out things like hardly anyone on the hill had their children going to local schools. And so we had to have all those reports and pay for all those reports.
This quotation highlights both the importance of being equipped with technology-
based, expert testimony in order to establish these environmental effects, and the
scope of the Resource Management Act which demands that citizens translate their
aspirations for their neighbourhood and city into a matter or bio-physical
environmental sustainability.
The Objective City and the Fair City
One of the reasons the technocratic approach to urban sustainability appears so
convincing, at least at a superficial level, is that it has the appearance of being
objective. Though this obviously connects with my earlier discussion of science as
monolithic, it is widely believed that this should allow all urban residents to enjoy
equal right of access to the processes of urban planning and resource management
and, should there be any disagreement, the Environment Court is there to provide
unbiased and objective decisions based on the evidence presented. The idea that this
process is fair and equal lends moral support to the technocratic approach to urban
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management and practice. Yet, my findings suggest that this appearance of objectivity
and equity is moot. This first came to my attention during an interview with a
Residents' Association representative who highlighted how some of these processes
associated with the Court can play out in inequitable ways that then have definite and
enduring impacts on the urban fonn and the lifestyles of nearby residents. We had
been talking about her legal battle with a real state developer:
The developer had the best lawyer, well not necessarily the best, but one of the best. And we got who we thought was equal best. They had someone who never forgot anything and we had Mr M who was an intellectual. And we had him, but then the Environment Court double booked him and then they wouldn't let us change the date so that he could act for us. So we had another lawyer and we were hard pressed to find someone to equal the other lawyer. The other side suggested a QC who we could have and so we were stuck with this QC. He was nice, but he didn't actually know about stuff and I had to keep feeding him stuff and so we lost. And so after that, the neighbourhood were really fed up with it. They were fed up with it before then but you have to go to the end. And so we went to the end and we lost and the new people are there and that's fine. But we felt we didn't have a fair go. We lost Mr M and it wasn't like we had equal minds.
In the opinion of some of the other interviewees, many of the decisions made in the
Environment Court were not the result of scientific or technical evidence, but of how
deep the pockets were of the parties involved. As one City Council Community
Advocate noted with pointed scepticism: .r
The RMA says you can do what you like whereas [the fonner Town and Country Planning Act] ... told you what you couldn't do. Now it's quite open for interpretation and for some people to make mileage out of it. And I think a lot of people make big miles out of the RMA. Sustainability, in the end, is just two lawyers debating it out forever and a day. It's just that one group of lawyers will be paid by someone longer than the other group of lawyers.
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Indeed, profound disillusionment with this aspect of the Resource Management Act
and the Environment Court was widespread and has led to a sceptical dismissal of the
RMA as being an acronym for the Rich Man's Act.
Misanthropy in the City
It was my observation that some of the interviewees were intensely passionate
about nature and the bio-physical environment. Sadly, it sometimes seemed that this
concern for the bio-physical environment had pushed the needs and aspirations of
other people to the periphery. One City Council planning team member, for
example, told me 'I thought the world was a bad place and that people didn't
deserve much help so 1 thought I'd help the environment instead'. Such comments
were not uncommon. A different member of the City Council planning team, for
example, responded to my question about the rights of communities to object to
partiCUlar developments in the following way:
Suzanne: What about if something is sound in a technical environmental sense but it's something that the community doesn't want? Planning Team Member: That happens all the time. That's your cell phone tower, your landfill. They fight them and it's more difficult under the RMA to fight it from a NIMBY point of view. Why shouldn't it happen if it's environmentally sound?
Some interviewees took this to the extreme and presented people not only as having
little right to veto moves undertaken in the name of the bio-physical environment, but
as some kind of pest that might actually have to be eradicated. One City Council
employee, for example, told me that 'We almost need more disasters, or we need
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more floods in the North Island. We need these events that wake people up to seeing
the global picture'. Such a stance can appear cruelly misanthropic.
While this misanthropy, where more disasters are required to educate (or even
eliminate) an undeserving public, was rare it was not uncommon to hear talk of the
need for a 'top-down' approach which was a very pleasant euphemism for a quasi
dictatorship consistent with some people's use of the term' eco-nazi'. Importantly,
among this group it seemed that the ends justified the means and the implications for
practice were a plethora of alternative regulations, restrictions and rules that would
make people modify their behaviour. One interviewee justified his view by arguing
that this would be not only good for the environment, but good for people as well
because such measures would help them re-fashion their values and aspirations alonK
more meaningful lines. So while these interviewees might be described as eco
centred, underlying this is a view of New Zealand society as profligate and unthinking
in their resource use, over-indulgent and unaware of the consequences of their actions,
and this serves as sufficient justification for their misanthropy.
Coercion and Consent
Others were less dictatorial preferring instead a 'carrot rather than stick' approach
where education was key in persuading people to change their behaviour in the name
of sustainability. This adaptation of behaviour has clear links to the concept of
hegemony which is most effective when people come to believe they are voluntarily
acting in their own best interests as opposed to being coerced. The following
quotation is a both a good example of this concept in action and representative of
those whose view is that education is key in the implementation of sustainability:
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Planning team member: Most people can't comprehend the scale of it and so they throw their hands up and say what can I do about it. So that curtails a lot of people. Then there're people who say the world is going to hell in a handbasket so I might as well make the most of it and it doesn't matter what I do. But the people who learn a bit about it and believe that they can make a difference will modify their behaviour. That's the majority.
While it may be optimistic to suggest that 'the majority' will change their ways with a
little education, there was evidence that learning about the bio-physical environinent
could inspire people to think and act in new ways. There was little to suggest,
however, that a reliance on the purely technical aspects of sustainability was the best
way of doing this. I would generally asked the interviewees how they came to be
interested in environmental issues, and it was rare to hear people speak of a
conversion based purely on scientific evidence. More often, and in a manner
consistent with Macnaghten's (2003) findings, it was when bio-physical
environmental issues were tied to other features of everyday life or when they could
put the information into some kind of context that people became interested in
sustainability. This made the technical discourse more permeable and allowed
connections to be made between the science and the art of everyday living. The
following excerpt from an interview with a Christchurch City Councillor is a good
example of this.
Councillor: So I stood in for the Mayor and flew down and it was absolutely amazing looking down at [the landscape] from the air. I saw the wonderful river and landscape. It just looked so pristine and on either side it was so green and I thought this is something that we have to retain. And we got down to Spencer Park and there were crowds of people, there must have been about 3000 people, and I was quite taken aback and they had put up different photos of around Styx River and their plan was to make it what they call a Living Laboratory. It meant a lot. The Living Laboratory is made up of representatives from Ecan, Landcare, NIW A, CCC and Lincoln University and I would sit there and I wouldn't know all the gobbledy gook they were talking about half the time.
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Suzanne: Was there a bit of jargon? Councillor: Yes and I would think what am I doing here? But I've learned as time has gone on and I've come to realise their vision and how important it is that we keep the river clean and what's in the river and how the scientists would go out and measure the flows and cockabullies and see what's there and what's come back since they've been doing all these things. Now I'm starting to understand their jargon and what they're doing. And so it has become more impOliant to me.
For this Councillor it was hearing the' gobbledy gook' in the context of the Living
Laboratory that made sustainability important to her, but others talked of other factors
such as aesthetics, social factors surrounding poverty and hardship, health concerns or
disquiet about the kind of world their children would inherit had helped people
become aware of, and interested in, sustainability. It was this interest that stimulated
change and made people willing to alter their behaviour; this has some important
implications for urban sustainability and I discuss these in Chapter Eleven.
Saving the Environment by Keeping it Real?
Despite the urban prefix, much of the talk surrounding sustainable cities and towns
focuses on the bio-physical environment. As a corollary, a technocratic discourse has
become dominant and this both supports and is supported by this reduction of a
complex concept to but one of its components. The finer points of any distinction
between sustainability and sustainable development seem to have been lost, and now
sustainability with a focus on the bio-physical environment acts as a synecdoche for
the more comprehensive version ofthe concept. Consequently, the focus is turned
away from social and economic affairs and the connections between the three
components of what was the orthodox tripartite.
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This reductionism has become institutionalised in the Resource Management Act,
whose ambiguities encourage practitioners to tum to the apparent certainty provided
by an 'objective' portrayal of the bio-physical environment. This focus on the
technical bio-physical environmental elements of sustainability means that, more
widely, even community aspirations sUlTounding living densities, open spaces,
community facilities, and the location of collective goods such as cell phone towers,
have to be translated into a technocratic discourse around adverse environmental
impacts. This process of translation ostensibly renders decision-making equitable at
one level, but is profoundly altered from this ideal in practice. The realities oflegal
representation and funding opportunities expose the objectivity of some decision-
making processes as somewhat farcical, even if the intent is to be fair and just and to
ensure the bio-physical environment is protected from the adverse effects of activities,
That the bio-physical environment is seen to be as, if not more, important than people
in the technical city is highlighted by some of the comments made during the course
of this study. In extremely misanthropic accounts, people need to be exposed to
deprivation and disaster for the good of the environment; their needs and aspirations
made subservient to some semi-sentient, vengeful entity (as might be constructed
from, for example, Lovelock's (1987, 1995) presentation of 'planet' Gaia). The
technocratic discourse distances such interviewees from the social consequences of
their nature-worship. More circumspectly, many others preferred a less hostile . . - -.
approach where education about the jargon-laden, technico-scientific aspects of
sustainability are married to everyday life using real examples.
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Chapter Ten: Sustainability as Composite - Untangling the Web
In the previous chapter I presented results outlining the ways in which urban
sustainability was often reduced to a technical problem concerned with the bio-
physical enviromnent. While this approach has its problems, it also has an appealing
simplicity that stands in stark contrast to the messier versions of urban sustainability I
outline in this chapter. The results presented here reveal urban sustainability to be a
more complicated business than engaging in simplistic strategies such as using energy
efficient lightbulbs, and I would like to explore the aspects of this complexity in more
detail. This includes looking at such issues as how the current growth model can be
modified so as to be more sustainable (in the sense risk theorists might use the term),
the discourses surrounding survival, the implications of different timeframes for
sustainabilityand the role of risk and reality. Finally I present research results that
relate to economic and social sustainability.
An Holistic Approach
In many definitions, sustainability is a composite of, typically, three strands
comprising bio-physical environmental, social and economic aspects. Indeed, for
many organisations and individuals establishing and maintaining a balance between
the three is the essential feature of sustainability, a feature which sets it apart from
other environmental or social movements. This tripartite forms the core of such
reporting procedures as Triple Bottom Line, business models like The Natural Step,
and organisational practice, such as that adopted by the Christchurch City Council and
which was the topic of one interview conducted with a City Council Community
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Advocate. Yet, as this interview shows, it is not always easy to implement or maintain
such holistic views of sustainability:
Community Advocate: I haven't really taken it [urban sustainability] on board much to tell the truth. Because I hate jargon. You know, words come in and words go out. What does it mean in reality. That's a good question. It doesn't really impact on my work as such. But sustainability was a really, really big thing about 2 years ago. There was a time when in any report that we had we had to do a grid and it had economic, social and environmental and we had to tick boxes and it was all about sustainability. For some reason that seems to have been diluted or. .. we no longer have to include this in our reports. Suzanne: Why was that? Community Advocate: I don't know. It just kind of faded out. ..
The City Council still employs a Sustainable Christchurch Leader, and sustainability
is still a significant part of City Council literature, yet the initial impetus that
popularised the term seems to have 'faded out' in practice. This made me wonder why
the term had become relegated, primarily, to official policy spaces.
One of the reasons is the complexity of holistic approaches to urban sustainability
and, ironically, this is both a benefit and a disadvantage. My research results suggest
that more comprehensive definitions of sustainability stimulate and incorporate
people's interests in a way that was largely absent from those technocratic and
reductionist accounts of sustainability presented in the last chapter, and this can
provide a powerful momentum for change. On this other hand, the complexity can be
quite overwhelming and can lead to a kind of despairing inertia. The difficulties
involved in even articulating holistic visions of sustainability is illustrated in this next,
inevitably lengthy, quotation from an interview with two members of an urban
interest group:
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Interviewee 1: I became aware of the environmental issues, economic issues ... they are also causes for war. And I came to see that living in an eco-community could be a possible solution for the future in terms of economics, environmental and social issues. Suzanne: How do we balance those three things? Interviewee 2: It's not clear. The Natural Step provides a clear guideline of what is sustainable and what isn't. With finance it's quite clear. With the social it's more ... Interviewee 1: Maybe with the social it's more blurred because we tend to screen out a lot. We take it as normal that so many percent of the population are over- or under-employed. It's institutionalised. We don't think that everybody has the right to work. Some are over-employed. There are health issues. Yeah, we complain about smoking and so on and yet in other ways, somebody's a murderer if you kill them with a gun but not with an environmental poison. That's just normal. If you kill someone over a long period of time, that's quite normal. That's accepted ... And that's why the social fabric ... It's been falling apart for a long time. There used to be large integrated extended families. Now it's the nuclear family and soon the main thing will be single mothers. And where does that lead? It's fragmenting more and more and we're not aware of the social implications of that. There's the increase of disease and children with disorders and whatever and they're all kind of connected in and it's difficult to point out this particular thing, or this particular poison caused it. Interviewee 2: One key thing would be where there is insecurity in the family where a mother in under stress and on her own. The children suffer the effects of that stress and insecurity and what do people seek? They seek comfort foods, they eat badly, they seek meaning in material things rather than in relationships and this affects the environment in terms of consumption and so forth. Interviewee 1: That's a problem. There's no clear-cut solution. It's like politicians love it when you have a clear-cut solution. Do this and the problem will be solved, but that's not the case. I think that's the thing about sustainability and moving to an integrated consciousness of interconnectedness that you can actually not solve things with a clear cut thing ... When you do something here, it will influence everything around you. So that's why you have to go quite carefully wh~n you implement social changes.
Indeed, it seemed that most of the interviewees, even those most fervent about the
idea, acknowledged there were difficulties with the holistic version of the urban
sustainability concept and the results suggest a strong consensus on this point.
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More contentious were the mechanisms by which these complexities might be
resolved, and this constituted something of an ideological battle. In some
respondents' view, only a dedicated planning team could be sufficiently informed
about the relevant issues to address sustainability to an adequate extent. Not
surplisingly, such opinions tended to prevail among members of the City Council's
planning team though it was also evident elsewhere. The following quotation is a
good example of this kind of talk:
Planning team member: We've had a social expert who's gone out and surveyed a lot of things. Two retail experts have wlitten quite substantial reports that we then try and bling together to actually argue that what the market sees as business as usual actually is unsustainable and there is some degree of management necessary to make the whole system work well for everybody. And it's not a case of being anti-competitive. Markets still need to floulish and they change and efficiencies are created all the time. But it's a case of saying if you do that then it will destroy that and you need to demonstrate that it won't happen. And it's taken a hell of a lot of research to get that.
Others tried to negotiate a sort of balance between state intervention and market
efficiencies:
Planning team member: A good city is one that promotes itself and its own identity but keeps its options open for new technologies and different changes ... You don't have to commit the city to a particular long-term direction which could end up being wrong. Make strategic incremental decisions which keep the form and direction of development achieving certain outcomes but at the same time enabling the existing identity of the garden city to be maintained.
The competing view, of course, was that only the market could successfully
accommodate all the relevant concerns and distribute the benefits appropriately.
Allied with this position, however, were a number of areas open to dispute. Some
respondents believed, for example, that a certain level of intervention was required to
create the right conditions to maximise market efficiencies. Establishing and
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regulating for bio-physical environmental 'bottom-lines' was one example of this.
Another was a degree of zoning for residential, commercial and industrial because, as
one respondent noted, without zoning someone could build a mall right next to
another mall and thus erode the profits accruing to the first mall. Too much
competition might not serve anyone's interests. Other respondents were convinced
that only a truly free market would be responsive to the complexities of urban and
seemed loath to admit to any benefits of state intervention.
Building Urban Sustain ability: Renovating and Demolishing
If two of the main challenges of more holistic accounts of urban sustainability, and
sustainability more generally, were the expanded sphere of the concept and the degree
of interconnectedness between the three strands, an additional problem was whether
the current system (of political institutions, planning orthodoxies, economic growth
models, bio-physical environmental limits, culture and so on) could be modified
incrementally to achieve sustainability or whether this entire system required a radical
demolition and rebuilding. A small group of interviewees were, for example, keen to
see the whole monetary system dismantled with such practices as interest bearing
accounts and, subsequently, inflation and the need for economic growth eliminated
altogether. Our current system would be demolished and replaced with alternative
currencies, such as the Green Dollar scheme, and policies more in line with those used
in some Islamic countries where the practice of usury is illegal. Equity and justice
would take more central roles in policy formation and this would require a whole new
set of institutions, such as 'eco-communities'. A thorough revamping would be
required because as it stands, the interconnections that exist between social, economic
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and bio-physical environmental aspects of sustainability actually support the
maintenance of the status quo or, as one interviewee put it, 'the rush towards hell in a
hand-basket'. Mere 'tweaking' cannot bring about the widespread changes necessary
to address their holistic view of urban sustainability.
In contrast were others who were dismissive of the type of radical approach that
would see the demolition of existing institutions and structures. They favoured a
process whereby 'the system' was gradually modified or renovated in order to achieve
sustainability. Such steps might include the recognition and accounting ofbio-
physical environmental extemalities45 or the substituting 'eco-friendly' products for
those that were more damaging to the bio-physical environment. These are the types
of measures the Ministry for the Environment outlined in its Simply Sustainable
(2005) directed towards the business community whereby greening office stationary
and cleaning products and using energy efficient equipment and appliances will move
us towards sustainability.
In some cases the interviewee thought they were being quite radical when they were
actually advocating fairly orthodox measures. In one example, an interviewee from
the City Council argued that people's values surrounding intangible assets of the city
or 'soft infrastructure' such as community feeling, voluntarism and so on should be
recognised more fully. He described how this might be achieved at some length:
CCC employee: Well, you might need a more complex tool, such as the Sustainability Assessment Model. Suzanne: How is the benefit to society calculated in this model?
45 Many bio-physical environmental externalities are not given a 'cost/price' in classic economics. The field of environmental economics seeks to include such externalities as costs and thus change the face of accounting.
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CCC employee: This is a very simplistic index which takes the total value of the positive benefits above the line against the absolute value of those below the line.
While this seemed to be a simple way of including social benefits in accounting
processes, I was curious as to how the benefits were calculated.
Suzanne: But how is the benefit to society calculated? CCC employee: This is on a willingness to pay basis ... And the willingness to pay, for oil for example, is the crude price and the pump price. Because that's what society is obviously willing to pay ... It's easy for decision makers to look at hard figures because they're hard figures. Even if they just look like hard figures but they're not actually hard figures! It's easy to use them in an assessment. If there are hard figures on the economic costs of option A and option B and then there's all this fluffy writing about the benefits and costs, how do you assess that? Everyone assesses it differently so that's why I think a monetised model is useful because people are used to dealing with costs in monetary terms. It has the robustness of having been produced by accountants and can be peer reviewed by accountants rightly or wrongly. And it helps the decision maker to compare the options in a way that they want to but they haven't been able to before because it hasn't been presented in that format before.
I then became curious as to how robust this model was in terms of including values
around community, aesthetics and so on:
Suzanne: Are there still things that are important that aren't incorporated into this model? CCC employee: Yes there are .... [Things like] social capital, the less tangible environmental things. What's the value of being able to walk down a [nice street like the one shown on a poster in the interview room] like this as opposed to walk along a drain? What's the value from that? There're a whole lot ofthings. There are a whole lot of things that don't lend themselves to valuing but you need to think that they are important and say that they are important. And put some effort into valuing them because otherwise they will be discounted and ignored.
Because this approach commodified intangible, qualitative aspects of urban life it is
rather a better example of tweaking or modification of the status quo than any radical
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challenge. While this seems to present a challenge to current financial orthodoxies on
a superficial level, because it, I this is more an out as a good example of incremental
change, or the tweaking, to existing institutions because it actually legitimised current
monetary policy rather than challenged it. It did this by converting often intangible,
qualitative aspects of urban life into a quantity with a financial value that could then
be bought and sold like any other commodity. In this way it stands in contrast to the
approach of those who would see many of our current accounting procedures,
financial incentives and monetary policies as major impediments to 'true'
sustainability and that need to be totally dismantled. Once again, therefore, the
concept of sustainability appears to accommodate a full range of attitudes and beliefs
which are enacted and implemented in vastly different ways.
Competing Demands and the Tragedy of the Commons
An important point underlying the above quotation concerning the monetised model is
the persuasive force of 'hard figures'. Despite this persuasive power, strangely, in
much of the talk surrounding urban sustainability economic dimensions were often
alluded to obliquely. I call attention to the strangeness of this sideways approach
because money, budgets and profit seemed to be on everyone's mind, though few
were willing or able to articulate their position in the context of urban sustainability.
In other words, while talk around sustainability seemed easy enough when limited to
bio-physical environmental concerns, the interviewees became less confident and less
coherent when asked to balance these with other competing demands, partiCUlarly
those of a financial nature. The following excerpt from an interview with a City
Council planning team member is a good example. He was telling me about a
programme Environment Canterbury is running:
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That programme, there's a strong emphasis on education rather enforcement. Carrots rather than sticks. They get all the people in the area together and tell them about their waterways and the state of them and ask them what they want. People always say they want clean water. So then they say well this is what you have to do.
Given that people want clean water and that we also know 'what we have to do' I
asked why the streams were still heavily polluted. The issue suddenly became more
complicated:
Planning team member: Well the focus is on getting [ farm] stock out of streams. It might take years because it can cost $30-40 thousand to build a bridge for stock. And to fence off all the streams ... We're talking about quite a lot of capital expenditure.
Again and again I encountered examples where efforts directed at implementing even
the more simple aspects ofbio-physical environmental sustainability failed in the face
of' economic realities'. This was the case with even the most basic of steps as shown
in this next quotation from a fervent advocate of recycling:
Suzanne: Well I'm looking at urban sustainability ... Businessman: Oh, it is a nice ideal, but it has to have a practical bent to it and recycling is a good way. People are getting used to it. We've got a shredder here, and this morning Joy said 'you can put more through the shredder, we've got somewhere for the paper to go'. And someone who breeds mice wants the paper! That's great because we go through reams of it. I think there're probably avenues for more and more of that. That must be the next move - to take the compostable material out of the rubbish bins. But that takes time and it might not be financially viable ...
In both these examples, even seemingly straight-forward, easily implemented bio-
physical environmental sustainability is exposed as complex when set against
financial imperatives. Significantly, this was rarely discussed. Instead there appeared
to be a fairly widespread endorsement of a fiction that being green and being
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profitable are always compatible. The 'clouds of positive affect' identified by Netting
(1993, in Stone, 2003) that surround sustainability seems to provide a convincing
veneer of congruity. This is sustainability's dirty secret: green business is not always
profitable, and being financially viable sometimes means compromising one's
environmental ethics.
The all-too-frequent incompatibility between these two led to a kind of discursive war
of words centred on survival. While eco-activists have long drawn on doomsday
rhetoric and alarmist accounts of imminent disaster, my results indicate that certain
business interests have begun to use a similar approach in order to justify their
actions. This is evident in the following quotations which highlight some of the
similarities in the discourse adopted by both eco-activists and economic interests:
Urban interest group representative: It [urban sustainability] means an ideal which the planet will enforce one way or another. We will reach a new equilibrium that is sustainable. But sustainability oflife as we know it now, human society, Western lifestyles, are a pipe dream. So what does it mean now? It means an interesting future where we are on a path to try and achieve sustainability. Where we try to make the crash landing which is now inevitable as soft as possible while we adjust and try and make provisions for breakdowns of systems.
Suzanne: What does it [sustainability] mean? CCC Planning team member: To me it means we can continue doing something in perpetuity. Suzanne: Do you think we can continue on in perpetuity? CCC Planning team member: Continue what? It depends what it is we're trying to do. Ifhumans maintain their current behaviour we'll probably be dead- before much longer. But I do think we are improving in some ways with our relations with mother earth. I'm not sure that we're going fast enough. We may still be on the path to self-destruction.
Real estate developer: The reality is that as a businessman your main concern is survival. It doesn't matter if you're a big company or a small one you don't know if you'll be there in 5 or 10 years time. Your competition may rub you out. Many
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people think that big business controls the world. They don't control a damn thing in my view. In fact I see corporates as being particularly vulnerable because they can't move fast enough. They're bureaucratised and if you look back at the leading companies 20 or 30 years ago you wouldn't know half the names. They've all been rubbed out or merged. Gone under. The life cycle of a company is remarkably short. It's the same in the development game. You can be a rooster today and feather duster tomorrow. We're only as good as our last deal. If we stuffup we're goners. It's hard to be right all the time. We carry the risk of these things all the time. So survival is the main thing.
Suzanne: Is there a problem with profitability and being green? Businessman: Well, if it's not profitable it doesn't survive. Totally green .. .I suppose the alternative is that we drown in our own shit. You can't make money without resources. But there's still this feeling in New Zealand that it is bad to make a profit. But if you don't have profit, you don't have businesses.
In all these examples, the interviewees used the notion of survival as a justification for
their actions and as a way of prioritising their cause by adding this compelling
element. The above quotations do more than establish survival as a key component of
the discourse around urban sustainability therefore; they also suggest that the policy
spaces ofthe economy and the environment not only overlap, but that they actively
compete for support and resources. Many interviewees, including this planning team
member, were able to provide examples of this:
Suzanne: You said that we knew how to be more sustainable but, if we know that, why isn't it happening? Planning Team Member: It's the tragedy of the commons. Because the effects are externalised. Money drives the modem economy. Say for example there's a company that produces chairs and one of the by-products is something that gets tipped in the rivers, for them to clean up that waste would cost them money and that would reduce their profit. That waste going into the river has a negative effect but they don't feel the effects themselves. The effects get averaged out across the community and the ecosystems. So that's the tragedy of the commons argument.
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While it may seem self-evident that the goals and aspirations of private interests and
environmentalists do not always align, such incompatibilities do not generally feature
in official versions of urban sustainability. Instead these tend to portray the concept as
involving win-win solutions for both business and the environment. Yet, many of the
interviewees were keenly aware of the difficulties associated with being both
profitable and green and blamed this divergence of interests for the failure of the
concept to generate widespread understanding and support, or to modify people's
behaviour in meaningful ways.
Risk and Reality: Global Problems and Local Issues
A further problem with stepping beyond relatively limited bio-physical environmental
definitions of sustainability is making connections explicit between some of the more
serious global problems and their local manifestations. Indeed, the difficulties
involved in making these ties was a source of frustration for some interviewees. I
have already noted one case where the interviewee commented that 'we almost need
more floods ... to make people aware' of global environmental issues. Though this
represents the most misanthropic of examples provided by the interviewees it does
raise questions about what sorts of evidence urban practitioners need in order to
understand global risk and the consequences of their own actions in the local
environment. The following excerpt is a good example ofthis:
Suzanne: What about some of those global issues, like peak oil? Real estate developer: You have no idea how tough it is to make money. Hugely tough. It's hard to make money because it's so competitive in most industries. There are so many issues to deal with and cost overruns and all the rest. .. They have to pay the wages and the subcontractors and ... So that would be
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the least of my worries as far as the oil situation is concerned. I would tend to the Lamborg thinking. I'm yet to be convinced. Suzanne: What would convince you? Real estate developer: Good hard evidence like signs at the station: 'No gas today, none left'. I feel quite comfortable with that possibility and I think these guys [planners] should be worrying about real issues that we face everyday here and not getting off on all that esoteric stuff.
Though some would think it absurd to deny the concept of peak oil, this practitioner
was not alone in his scepticism. These two positions were contrasted very nicely in
two interviews with people from different professional practices who had a common
interest in a particular piece of council-owned land. The first interviewee is a fervent
advocate ofbio-physical environmental sustainability in urban environments and was
familiar with many global issues, while the second is a Residents' Association
representative who has been very active in this role over the past few years:
Interest group member: Whatever time I have left over is spent with the Agenda 21 forum which is another organisation. And our current project is looking at a big area of City Council-owned land at the showgrounds. The land adjacent to the showgrounds is the Curletts retention basin which is an area of open-space and floodplain and a lot of people have been using that land for recreational purposes and we're doing interviews with all the users of the park and some potential users to see how the park can be managed in terms of sustainability to achieve better resource efficiency on the site to reduce traffic generation and so on. So we're looking at an example of sustainability planning.
Suzanne: What about in the future? What sort of issues do you think will come up? Residents' Association representative: We had a group approach us to speak at our meeting 2 or 3 months ago and they were a professional body made up of professional people like civil engineers and architects and all this sort of thing. And they want to see it [the Showgrounds] utilised properly and so forth. And it was quite funny, they said that in 10- 20 years time of course, the number of cars on the road will be considerably decreased and of course we just laughed at them. This was their idea. Because we're going to run out of fuel and all that and you know, and there's just not going to be the cars around. I'm not sure how
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they think we're all going to get around! Go back to horse and cart?! I just don't know what planet they're from. So this was quite laughable. Of course, they're developing other forms of fuels and so forth. You know, petrol probably will run out some time but they'll be developing other forms of fuel. I don't think we'll be back to the horse and cart.
This certainly shows the diversity of ways in which global bio-physical environmental
risks are understood and, as corollary, acted upon. This was made clear in the
recommendations each was making for the showgrounds and their proposals for
development of that land. The first interviewee considered it in terms of resource
efficiency and the minimisation of private travel to the site by connecting it to local
people. The second interviewee saw it as a resource for the city at large based on a
conviction that easy personal automobility will continue indefinitely.
The focus of sustainability and the scale of the problems accommodated under this
rubric clearly leads to additional problems around clarity, and if this is the case for
relatively well-defined and well-publicised bio-physical environmental problems, one
can only imagine the confusion that would be generated should socio-economic issues
like Third World debt be added to the mix. So while the limited bio-physical
environmental sustainability of the last chapter had its disadvantages, so too does the
holistic perspective which tries to forge connections between a range of different,
sometimes contradictory and often nebulous, issues and goals. While large scale, self-
generated risks need to be addressed, it is often difficult to find the beginning of the
thread that ties causes and consequences together in everyday life.
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Sustain ability: A Matter of Time?
Along with the possibly irreconcilable positions of certain business interests and
environmentalists, another area in which the urban sustainability discourse becomes
unclear centres on the treatment of time and the timeframes within which urban
practitioners work. The confusion that results from adopting different timeframes for
sustainability is evident in the following excerpts:
Group housing representative: The country's full of people who are short sighted. Auckland city has a massive problem now with transportation and it's the capital of New Zealand in terms of population and industry and so on. The transportation system is in a mess. Many years ago [the mayor] wanted to put an underground rail system through Auckland but he was laughed away and now look at the problems they're facing. A lot of the costs to the country [could have been saved, but it was] hoo haaed away. All it is is 'save the dollar' mentality. Short term. No long term thought going in to it. Suzanne: Do you see the same kind of thinking in the building industry? Group housing rep: We've had it: The leaky building syndrome.
Suzanne: Do you have any thoughts on how some people use the term [urban sustainability]? Residents Association representative: Well, that's a hairy question. Probably some people would use it to their advantage for a quick buck. So actually getting in and saying I can do this, I can develop this and that because at the time economically it's very viable. But in 20 years time it isn't. Take the centre of the city for example. You're going out [for shopping and entertainment] to the suburbs [suburban malls] now and the whole centre of the city is fading. We haven't got any underground to get in there easily and parking and everything. So probably for a quick buck is probably when it's used. Economics at the time. Sustainable at that particular time but what about the future?
One of the factors prompting a pursuit ofthe 'quick buck' is the quest for certainty.
This was a theme that emerged quite strongly in interviews with urban practitioners in
the private sector. The flavour of their comments was that trying to see the future of
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10, 15 or 20 years time was too difficult. It made better economic sense, therefore, to
work with the certainties ofthe moment:
Group housing representative: Sustainability? I suppose there are bits and pieces like your heat and that sort of thing. Energy efficient heating and people trying to push solar panels and that sort of thing. But when you start getting out of the norm there's a cost. There's one guy a few months ago trying to push these solar panels but to set it up was going to cost 15-20 grand! Just to set it up. To recoup that money might take 10 years! I can't see the value to me personally in doing that, because you don't know where you're going to be in 10 years. And all you're doing is setting it up for someone else. But that's purely looking at it as a dollar value.
Real estate developer: That doesn't mean that in 20 years from now that everybody will have the same opinion [about the success of the subdivision] because trends might change and the emphasis might go away from having all those parks and everyone wants to go to live in the middle of town because you can't use your car anymore. It's hard. You can only look so far ahead into the future. You can only make it sustainable to those people who first come into it and for the next, this is ball park stuff, for the next 10 years. Anything further than 20 years is getting ... well ... crystal balls don't go that far out.
The effort to reduce long-term uncertainty clearly fed certain kinds of behaviour some
would consider unsustainable, such as not including solar hot water facilities in new
homes or planning subdivisions that do not enjoy good access to public transport.
This does raise some interesting questions about the appropriate timeframes for
sustainability and the structures that subtly support a focus on the immediate future.
At least two examples from the interview data suggest that year-by-year accounting,
for example, does little to encourage a more long-term approach:
Urban interest group representative: It's difficult to convince people to look at the long term picture and not just the short term. Politicians look until the next elections, managers look until the financial year ends. It is to convince them to look
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further than that instead of just fixing something now even though it is conventional economics. There, the future is discounted. So how do you convince people? The economy seems to be the bottom line to convince society currently but even when it is good economic sense it doesn't always work. .. I'm trying to get the 'Business X' to see that they have to spend an extra $27 000 per year and some one-off costs and with that investment they can have a 20% reduction in paper use. And this will save them more than $300 000 per year. But they won't get it in the first year. So the first year, it's money out, but from year two onwards they get a quarter million dollar gain and it will be on-going. However, they only look at this year's deficit.
Real estate developer: For a company like ourselves when we look at developing big sites obviously we look at the financial returns that we might be able to get from it. And the way we do our financial analysis is similar to a lot oflarge companies, we do discounted cash price, so we look at the value of our money over time. So the longer the period of development, the harder it is to get it to work financially. Because we're looking at the net present value of the property we'll be getting. So ifit's going to take ten years to get a million dollar profit, the value of that million dollars in 10 years is nowhere near as much as it would be if we got it in 5 years. So when you keep that in mind, when you look at master planning a big project like this, the more areas that we can operate in and develop at the same time, the shorter the time frame that we can get the overall project, the better the financials will be. And it's not necessarily the better they'll be in total dollars, but in the value of those dollars because it's shorter time. It helps if we can shorten that period.
Once again, such examples raise interesting questions about how institutions and
structures around commercial practices, including discounting and annual tax returns,
might be established or modified to encourage a long-term view.
Social Sustainability
Thus far I have focussed on bio-physical environmental and economic aspects of
sustainability because, in the first instance, 'the environment' ostensibly dominates
this discourse whilst, in the second case, economic interests constitute a less overt but
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no less powerful influence. I have not, however, said a great deal about the social
dimensions of urban sustainability and it is to this task I now tum.
One ofthe primary reasons why social sustainability has had such a modest role so far
is because it was not often the focus, or even a part of, talk about urban sustainability.
This is not to say that social issues were not addressed at all, just that such talk rarely
came up in this context. This lack of engagement with social issues under the rubric of
urban sustainability accounts for the paucity of data reported here, and I have to resort
to what has become a well-worn argument; that a lack of data is still data. This is
particularly interesting given cities are essentially agglomerations of people first and
foremost.
I have already noted some distinctions in the literature that have led to my
categorisation of three types of social sustainability (maintenance, development and
bridge sustainability46) and here I outline the ways in which the data spoke to these
themes. The first of these is maintenance sustainability and it was certainly possible to
identify scattered examples ofthis within the interview data. However, it was far
more common to observe great conflict over what to maintain and what to change in
order to achieve bridge sustainability where certain aspects of society are believed to
be in need of change in order to bring about bio-physical environmental sustainability.
The next quotation is a good example of this as it illustrates the difficulties of
persuading people to walk to their place of work or school when there are values, such
as safety or social status to consider.
46 'Maintenance sustainability' refers to the preservation of socio-cultural characteristics in the face of forces of change; 'development sustainability' addresses poverty and other inequities; and 'bridge sustainability' concerns changes in behaviour in order to achieve bio-physical environmental goals (see pages 56 to 62).
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Residents' Association representative: I don't know where the people in Milnes Court are going to go to school. I don't think they're zoned for RaIswell. And I think the first Milnes are zoned for Rowley. Now Rowley would not be a school that those people would want to send their children to. Not because they couldn't walk to school but because Rowley is a very low socioeconomic area. And they won't want their kids to go to school with kids who are disadvantaged. Most parents don't want that in case their kids get mixed up with the naughty ones. So I don't know what's going to happen to those children or where they go to school now because RaIswell and Oaklands have closed rolls. I don't know where people from Aidanfield are going to go.
In this case, walking to school (bridge sustainability) was pitted against avoiding
behavioural problems (maintenance sustainability), but more commonly, the conflict
was situated between bridge sustainability and (over) consumption which has come to
inform particular lifestyles and accepted notions of quality oflife. The following is
just one example of this kind of talk:
Interest group member: We are educating all the time of course. And our children have 5 years at home and what they get there in terms of education is random. And then they go to a school system that doesn't do anything particularly wonderful in terms of giving them an interconnected, holistic view. And that's just a small part. A greater part is them out there exposed to all the other stuff in society, the bulk of which, or the best funded of which, are all those commercial messages. This is what you need in order to be successful and enjoy life. So we're educating them in exactly the wrong way for survival, for sustainability. Why is this education, why is advertising happening this way? It's to serve the bottom line. The bottom line is money and to keep the system functioning.
It was a reasonably strong theme, particularly among well-placed civil servants. As
one Regional Council manager, for example, pointed out 'You can teach people about
the environment and regulate against adverse effects, but how do you regulate against
a need for 7 bathrooms'? Another senior member of the Ministry for the Environment
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also mentioned this in a discussion about the fragility of cities and what happens when
the systems that actively support life in the city breaks down. He view was that:
When you cut the lifeline stuff, the order that goes with them and the security, you get anarchy. And you get a crude tribalism reasserting itself. If order breaks down and the supplies oflife's necessities go, which these days includes lattes and chardonnay, you get absolute chaos.
This raises some interesting questions about our ability to reconcile quality of life (as
indicated by the bouquet and taste of one's pinot noir) and a bridge sustainability
based around bio-physical environmental limits.
There was less conflict between these two forms of social sustainability and the third
strand that I labelled development sustainability. This is because the development side
of sustainability was very rarely mentioned. If it was brought up at all it was generally
subsumed rather quickly into one of the other two strands of sustainability that I have
already outlined. The following highlights this tendency:
Residents' Association representative: Sustainability is really about not making things worse. So that you can have development so long as it doesn't actually wreck the environment. It's a bit like the boiled frog, that analogy. You have a frog and the water is cold and you put in a little bit of hot water and the frog doesn't notice, and a bit more. And you raise the temperature quite a bit and the frog hasn't noticed it until the point where the frog is dead. And that's a really good analogy for sustainable development. You can reach a point, and it's a fine line, and you can keep raising all these things, you can keep adding subdivision after subdivision but it reaches a point where you've got total chaos and unsustainability or the death of rivers or the death of communities. Sustainability to me means that you really do have to balance things and so sustainability is about environments, it's about people and it's about communities so if any of those things get out of kilter then you have not got a sustainable system.
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Only one respondent made an explicit connection between bio-physical
environmental degradation and social development. He argued that the only way to
solve environmental problems was to make people richer. In short, my results show a
widespread neglect of this aspect of sustainability within the wider discourse; a
somewhat surprising outcome given its importance in the Oliginal arguments for
sustainable development.
A Balanced Tripartite?
In summary, the holistic version of sustainability encompasses, and attempts to
balance, at least three dimensions; the social, the economic and the bio-physical
environmental. This is what gives sustainability its novelty in relation to other, longer
standing ideals and it also accounts for some of its broad appeal. On a superficial
level, at least, there is something there for everyone.
Dig beneath the surface, however, and there are some fundamental problems with the
concept of holistic sustainability, not least of which is its incredible complexity. The
results demonstrate significant problems even articulating a coherent account of
holistic versions of sustainability, and this begs more substantial problems with its
implementation. This is due in part to the ways in which each of the three dimensions,
traditionally treated as distinct, actually melt into each other, overlap and collide in
sometimes irreconcilable ways. This is why incremental tweaking of the current
system appears unlikely to fully achieve holistic sustainability and subscribers to this
version of the concept tend to be more radical in their orientation. Nothing less than
demolishing and starting again with new ways, new values and new institutions will
bring about a balance between the three elements.
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The very survival of the human race is often presented as justification for this radical
upheaval, and here we see a counter-discourse in operation as those who could be
described as ecological modernists adopt similar terminology. The stance ofthe latter
group is underpinned by a sense that the New Zealand economy is very fragile and
that New Zealanders are constantly on the verge of economic ruin with only the most
tenuous grasp on an economy at the mercy of global caprice. Actions taken in the
interest of short-term financial survival were therefore privileged over distant,
'esoteric' goals such as urban sustainability. The absence of' good, hard evidence'
surrounding either bio-physical environmental limits or social deterioration and
injustice make holistic versions less potent, particularly when there are more pressing
concerns to attend to here and now.
Of the three pillars of sustainability, social dimensions received the least
consideration and were subject to the greatest degree of confusion. While social
concerns were often seen as important, importantly, they were not often the focus of
talk within the context of urban sustainability. This title is ostensibly reserved for bio
physical environmental issues even among those who saw clear connections between
the two. When the social was included, it was usually in the context of either bridge or
maintenance sustainability. That these, too, are sometimes irreconcilable was not
often made explicit. This points to some significant gaps in the discourse around
urban sustainability and highlights some difficulties with the concept as it is expressed
even in its more holistic forms.
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Chapter Eleven: Discussion
I began this thesis with the observation that the term 'urban sustainability' was
gaining currency in official documents and publications (see Appendix One), and
seemed to be used with increasing frequency in various other media. Much of this
material suggests that the concept might be difficult to implement, but not that it
might be practically impossible, conceptually contradictory or inherently flawed.
There is, however, a growing critique exploring and exposing the term's chiasmatic
quality, such that its practical utility and conceptual coherency is questioned. Some of
the arguments against the concept are almost as well-established as the concept of
sustainable development itself, having erupted in the wake of the publication of the
Brundtland Report in 1987. Other critiques are more recent and stem from
developments in urban political ecology. Analyses from this emergent field suggest a
need to explore the urban sustainability problematic in terms of the politics immanent
to the concept that pertain to the very nature ofthings, to the 'urban' and to 'nature'.
Furthermore, the role the concept urban sustainability plays in the transformation and
preservation of social and economic goals also needs to be explored. It is this
background that frames the discussion of my results.
Locating the Visible City
The first of my results to be discussed here is that of the 'visible city', a title that
suggests the existence of an elusive counterpart: the 'invisible city'. This distinction,
and the positing of an invisible urban, may appear curious given the city is both
obviously and evidently there, and to deny it, as Rescher (2005, pp. 29 - 30) has
noted, would be 'not just false but absurd and wildly eccentric'. Indeed, in this light, a
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focus on the perceived or 'representational spaces' (Lefebvre, 1991) of the city seems
quite justified. Yet, much of the literature reviewed in earlier chapters Lefebvre, 1991,
Soja, 2000, Merrifield, 2005) indicates that a distinction between perceived space,
conceptual representations of space and spatial practice is important therefore, here, I
would like to explore why and how this is the case.
My data indicate an overwhelming preference for the idea that cities are manifestly
out there, created of tarmac and trees, housing and sewers. It exists, it can be planned,
manipulated and administered as an apolitical entity bound to the clear dictates of
rationality and reason. This is the spatial city which is physically obvious to us,
responsive to quantification in terms of densities of housing, people and functions.
This perceived city of 'representational space' finds its counterpart in the
conceptualised city of 'representations of space' found in the City Plan, the Greater
Christchurch Urban Design Strategy and the Southwest Area Plan (Lefebvre, 1991).
All of these, as I have shown, tend to treat the city as representational space.
This tendency is substantiated by the interview data which suggest a heavy emphasis
on the physical city in their descriptions of their everyday professional practice. This
focus has been reinforced by messages, both subtle and explicit, from central
government as was clear in many of the publications observed as part of this study
and a number of interviews. One interviewee, a City Council planner, not only
confirmed the emphasis on the perceived spaces of the city but also hinted at the
significance of this focus in terms of its effects. As he outlined it, if the physical
manifestations of the city, such as air, water, transport and energy, are managed
appropriately those nebulous and more subtle aspects of the urban environment will
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supposedly 'take care ofthemselves'. He saw this as the legacy ofthe 'New Right'
ideology of the 1990s, exemplified in the Resource Management Act, which
essentially discouraged a focus on anything other than the technical and tangible. This
understanding of the city has some interesting implications for the interpretation and
application of a concept like urban sustainability.
The technocratic discourse and the visible city
My results indicate that the urban sustainability discourse is profoundly reductionist
in that it is predominantly delineated by particular readings of the bio-physical
environment counterpoised against less overt, but no less powerful, economic
imperatives. It is informed by a realist ontology where nature and the environment are
independently extant, objectively knowable and singular, and are therefore able to be
revealed to us through scientific principles and practices applied in the urban setting.
This reading of 'the environment' provides us with a number of unproblematic,
rational and 'useful places to start' in our pursuit of urban sustainability, and include
such measures as providing recycling facilities and public transport.
Consistent with a spatial (di)vision of the city and the country, nature and the bio
physical environment are located somewhere 'out there' beyond the urban periphery.
Artificial administrative boundaries and the remnants of a green belt insulate the city
from the country and this hides many of the intricate functional and conceptual
interdependencies that exist between the two. While these, such as the need for
coordinated growth management, have recently begun to be acknowledged in the
Greater Christchurch Urban Design strategy, the interconnections are more often
overlooked. The prevalent view is a separation of the city and its hinterland, the
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consequences of which are manifold. It ensures nature does not 'talk back' to
urbanites to any significant extent; nature-based aesthetics are portrayed as innocent
and devoid of political content; and, finally, the spatial orientation encourages an
over-reliance on technical solutions to environmental problems, often in a manner
consistent with the tenets of ecological modernisation.
The interview data indicate fairly widespread support for this approach, particularly
among some interviewees from the private sector whose answer to social inequities
and bio-physical environmental problems was to 'make people richer'. The National
Party, too, finds it convincing, particularly as it appears to accommodate Member of
Parliament Nick Smith's endeavour to be both 'rich and clean' through the
identification of appropriate technologies. It is also complementary to the views of
some members of both the City and Regional councils' planning teams who favoured
a new emphasis on 'neutral' scientific data collection over more contentious processes
of advocacy and negotiation. This version of the sustainability discourse finds its
institutional home, by accident or design, in the Resource Management Act and in the
Environment Court which is the forum for the settlement of environmental disputes.
This is presented as neutral terrain in which to solve such disagreements using expert
accounts and factual data.
There is a simplicity about this model of urban sustainability which, when combined
with the ways it supports certain powerful interests, is quite compelling. It is a city
allied to order, reason, profitability and environmental friendliness, overlaid with the
kind of social responsibility vague references to sustainability usually connote.
However, the problem with this spatial city is simply this: nobody lives there.
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Locating the Invisible City
The notion of a sustainable city responsive to an unbiased, rational management is
attractive on some levels, however, the urban practitioners with whom I spoke clearly
had problems ignoring the often intractable disorder that insisted on colouring their
everyday professional practice. As a result of this observation it is necessary to
discuss some ofthe ideas underpitming this untidy and insistent, iflargely invisible,
city. I include in this discussion some of the material developed by Soja (1999 and
2000) on Thirdspace, Flyvbjerg (2001) regarding context, and Law (2004) on
multiplicity.
The data clearly showed technocratic versions of urban sustainability to be
marvellously appealing on the one hand, but almost impossible to implement
successfully on the other. Some examples from the data illustrate this failure: The
Environment Court, for example, is clearly able to be negotiated more successfully by
some groups than others. The pejorative 'Rich Mans' Act' is a not-so subtle indication
of whose interests that are thought to be served by this institution. Those who can
afford to pay a range of expert witnesses to advocate their cause are more likely to
engender a positive result than those who merely have a NIMBY agenda. Another set
of examples cluster around 'environmentally friendly behaviour', such as using public
transport, which has public support in theory but is often less successful in terms of
actual patronage.47 These examples clearly relate to Hanson and Lake (2000) and
Portney's (2003, p. 128) concerns around the viability oftechnical solutions:
If a city has an internal air pollution problem, so the argument goes, correcting the problem is a job for professionals ... [But] if
47 Indeed, a group acting on behalf of residents in Northwood has recently lobbied Environment Canterbury to stop public transport entering their semi-gated subdivision.
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air pollution is a purely technical problem, then why have we not corrected the problem years ago?
I would argue that the phenomena that intrude on the successful implementation of
such strategies are simply those associated with actually being, though, as Blumer
noted, 'this require[ s] us to recognise that a human group consists of people who are
living' (1980, cited in Plummer, 1998, p.85). It is this lived-in-ness that Soja was
concerned to explore in Thirdspace (2000), that Flyvbjerg (2001) attempted to engage
with in his discussion ofphronesis (practical commonsense), and it underpins Law's
(2004) concept of multiplicity where different realities come into being through
practice.
Thirdspace
My data showed an overwhelming emphasis on what can be considered elements of
the Firstspace or 'representational spaces' of cities (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 2000). Most
of the technocratic solutions discussed above rightfully belong in Firstspace and here,
urban sustainability manifests as pollution levels, the inclusion of greenbelt and
greenways, waste products or the provision of public transport, all administered
within certain boundaries and zones. Secondspace overlays this city and provides
symbolic content. This is a conceived space of plans, art and other abstractions,
including such ideas as the Garden City. This space is also informed by concepts like
sustainability but, most significantly, it falls short of accommodating the dynamic
quality of Thirds pace. It is this active aspect of urbanity that makes the city lived in,
rather than a mere physical site that reflects social concepts and it matters because it is
here that urban sustainability is actually made. It is in Thirdspace that the messy, often
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difficult and sometimes contradictory concept of urban sustainability is practiced and
made real.
Often, it is where resistance to the technocratic or fanatical versions of sustainability
takes place as they impose upon residents' quality of life, established traditions or
other widely accepted and agreed upon commonsense understandings (Godschalk,
2004; Vallance, Perkins, and Bowring, 2005a and b; Vallance, Perkins and Moore,
2005). Thirdspace is where 'maintenance' and 'bridge' forms of social sustainability
often come into conflict and the data contained plenty of examples of this: infill
housing versus low density lifestyles, public transport over private motor vehicle use,
electric heat pumps over solid fuel burners, water conservation over multiple
bathrooms, reduced electricity demand versus hot outdoor spas in winter, and so on.
Negotiating this conflict is very problematic in a democracy where issues around
quality of life play an important role in election promises and strategies, and in urban
residents' evaluations of what is appropriate urban form and practice.
Given its importance, one might wonder why Thirdspace and the conflicts and
cooperative ventures that activate it are so often overlooked by central and local
government. One answer is that the emphatic focus on technocratic versions of urban
sustainability is supported by an ideology that appears to confuse an understanding of
this Thirdspace with social engineering. For planners especially, the minutiae of daily
life now lie strictly outside their sphere of professional practice, though ironically, this
hands-off, laissez-faire approach has just as much effect as that of hands-on
intervention. Also ironically, this studious avoidance of everyday urban social life is
taking place in a climate of quite shameless promotion of values and ideals when it
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comes to private interests and marketing.48 Those in this industry are well-aware of
the value in understanding everyday, prosaic concerns about anything from pimples to
retirement homes.
In telIDS of sustainability, there appears to be a tension between 'telling people what's
good for them' and ignoring the quotidian to the point where technical solutions fail
due to a lack of understanding or because they do not connect closely with what
appears to be happening in everyday life (Macnaghten, 2003). While cleaner energy
generation or the reduction of toxins are sensible places to start in a technical sense,
my results suggest that this approach fails to connect with people as they go about
their daily lives in Thirdspace. The interviews reveal an important irony in this regard
as even the participants who enthusiastically espoused professional allegiance to
technical fixes simultaneously struggled to implement them in their everyday practice.
They were continually confronted with their own ambivalence, budgets, personal
preferences, schedules, and frailties. This is consistent with the findings of others
(Ingold 1993, for example) who use different terminology but likewise conclude that
much of the discourse around sustainability culminates in 'a process of separation,
detaching us from the domain oflived experience' (Macnaghten, 2003, p. 81).
Phronesis and practical wisdom
It is in everyday life that abstract concepts like urban su.stainability are played out. It
is also in this area that possible contradictions and ambiguities attached to such
concepts become problematic in definite ways. What, for example, does 'urban
sustainability' mean to the home owner who would like to install an expensive solar
48 A particularly good example of this, as outlined by Eric Schlosser (200 1) in his F astfood Nation, is the new trend for private enterprises to supply schoolbooks with promotional material on the covers.
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hot water heating system, but who may be thinking of moving to a different area to be
closer to a particular school? What can the concept offer those who would replace a
single, detached dwelling on a wooded quarter acre section with three townhouses
surrounded by impervious surfaces? Does the concept help private enterprise balance
the business imperatives of today with the potential market of an uncertain future?
How does urban sustainability guide a decision between the greater perceived safety
of a gated community and social exclusion and inequality? These examples from my
research illustrate that what is practical is not always consistent with what is ideal and
this raises questions about how a difficult, ambiguous and contradictory concept like
urban sustainability can help guide such decision-making. In many ways, it appeared
that the concept was fulfilling Overton and Scheyvens' concern that it had 'little to
inform practice beyond principles and platitudes' (1999, p.l) though this might be
because we are too accustomed to believing there is one, single, best answer. This
situates Law's (2004) work as important in this discussion.
Multiplicity and singularity
Many of the interviewees made bio-physical environmental concerns a core part of
their version of urban sustainability and this can make it appear as if the concept is
singular in meaning. Law is critical of the notion of a singular world which he
describes as involving 'definite and limited sets of processes' which reveal a pre
existing world. 'Plurality', though closer, is also insufficient because it suggests
merely a conglomeration of different perspectives where realities do not necessarily
collide. 'Multiplicity', on the other hand, acknowledges that practice (which is a
feature of Thirds pace and relies on phronesis) produces not only different
perspectives, but different realities as well. These realities are constantly bumping
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and crashing into one another through variations in practice as would, for example,
the treatment of' alcoholism' in the ward, textbooks, out-patient clinics and so on.
My reading ofthe data is that, like alcoholism, urban sustainability also gathers
around it many different realities and practices, some of which can contradict other
accounts in the most fundamental of ways. Take, for example, the real estate
developer's definition of urban sustainability as not 'hampering growth or interfering
in markets unless there is good reason to do so'. Urban sustainability as he practices it
presents economic growth as the appropriate goal of sustainability, and the market as
the best distributive mechanism of its benefits. 'Interference' should be undertaken
only in extreme circumstances. A host of other convictions that make up the
hinterland ofthis reality are implicit or were made explicit in other parts of the
interview: the cornucopian human mind, human supremacy over nature, our ability to
identify and respond appropriately to bio-physical environmental limits, the easy
reconciliation of economic growth and social development, and so on.
This hinterland is enacted via a method assemblage of indices, research projects,
traditions, organisations, facts and evidence. This particular interviewee, for example,
called upon the findings ofthe Demographia Survey of median house and income
multipliers (to justify his anti-zoning stance), Bjorn Lomberg's The Skeptical
Environmentalist49, which contains 'hard facts' ana 'other data' that suggest 'we don't
49 This has been described as a book that: Challenges widely held beliefs that the global environment is progressively getting worse. Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues and documents that the global environment has actually improved. He supports his argument with over 2900 footnotes, allowing discerning readers to check his sources. Lomborg criticizes the way many environmental organizations make selective and misleading use of scientific data to influence decisions about the allocation of limited
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have a [bio-physical environmental] problem'. The way in which this picture of
reality is constructed ensures certain actions are seen as reasonable and rational (non-
intervention in, for example, social affairs) while others (such as redistribution via
taxation or even zoning) are 'unsound', irrational, overly interventionist.
This hinterland supports a reality that collides heavily with others that also fall under
the rubric of urban sustainability but which tend to emphasise social or eco-centric
aspects of the term that posit economic growth as antithetical to bio-physical
environmental sustainability and social well-being. Accordingly, the practices, the
hinterland and the method assemblage that supports them are quite different to that of
the real estate developer. The' facts' that support the call for stricter bio-physical
environmental guidelines or even a radical overhaul of the current growth model are _
different, as are the appropriate distributive mechanisms for benefits and externalities.
The results in practice are very different too. These can range from activities like
recycling facilities and services becoming essential features of urban management, to
alterations to the very physical form of the urban environment ~ in our houses, in our
subdivisions, and in the extent to which cities are compact or dispersed. Such
practices are what make these differences more than one of perspective. They create
realities which actively collude, crash, devastate or annoy each other and they all
swirl more or less convincingly under what appears to be a singular term, drawing
upon a belief in a single best answer. As a Foucauldian interpretation ofthe work of
Law (2004) and Flyvbjerg (2001) shows, however, a single best answer is only
possible in theory. Everyday life, on the other hand, often renders such theory
resources. The Skeptical Environmentalist is a useful corrective to the more alarmist accounts favored by green activists and the media. (www.lomborg.comlbooks.htm)
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impractical and although my research suggests that this singularity as it appears to
coalesce around the concept of urban sustainability is illusory, it does have physical
consequences in terms of the built environment, and these are worthy of closer
investigation.
The built environment and materiality
Discourse analysis has been a useful approach in this thesis because, in Fairclough's
words (1995, p. 40), it exposes 'systems of rules', that make certain things possible
but not others. As Benton and Short (1999, p. 2) have pointed out, 'Environmental
discourses are less innocent statements of the physical world and more politicised
representations'. These systems of representation employ metaphors, natural
relationships, agents and so on that constrain and support particular realities, and as
such, they are consistent with what Law (2004) presents as components of the
hinterland. Some examples from my research include the existence and rightful role
of markets and regulatory regimes, the natural relationships between social, economic
andbio-physical environmental concerns, and indeed, what might be included in a
definition of 'nature'.
In terms of my research, one of the more interesting critiques directed at discourse
analysis is a general lack of interest in its geographical implications. Murdoch (2004),
for example, argues for a return to Foucault's original focus on the materiality or
governmentality of discourse where specific discursive practices are reified in the
built environment, the physical form of which explicitly enables or constrains
particular lifestyle choices, daily activities and movements. This approach entails a
closer look at the sets of rationalities that accompany particular discourses. These
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discursive fields comprise programmes, plans and procedures that incorporate and
rely on various inscription devices that are subsequently forgotten or not made
explicit, leaving the illusion of a singular, inarguable reality. Thus, particular
rationalities, such as the compact city or, here in Christchurch, the Greater
Cluistchurch Urban Design Strategy, are literally made concrete. Abstract ideas like
'sustainability', 'equality' or 'lifestyle' subsequently take on a physical form which in
tum, naturalises further spatial practice (Zukin, 1999; Knox, 2005). This transmission
from rationality to reification is evident in a comparison of the rhetoric used by, for
example, the real estate developer with an explicit goal of influencing urban form
through zoning reform and Malcom Mason's (1904) commentary on the moral effects
of small houses which mean 'ill health, discontent, and a lack of interest in the home'
with a corresponding pejorative fixation with the 'public house and theatre' (in
Tennant, 2000, p. 28).
This raises some important questions about the impact ofthe largely technocratic and
reductionist discourse that I identified in the course of my research. What is being
naturalised? What is being marginalised? Whose interests are best served by these
processes?
Urban political ecology and economy
Much of the power and popularity of the technocratic rationality that informs spatial
practices stems from its appearance of neutrality. Owens (2005), for example, has
noted that many political and ethical choices masquerade as technical ones through
the application of supposed objective or scientific techniques. Knox (2005) also
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makes some interesting points around this theme in his assessment of the most recent
enchantment of the suburbs. In the context of my own work, though many of
Christchurch's newer subdivisions meet the requirements outlined in the Resource
Management Act of having a 'no more than minor [thebio-physical environmental]
effect', they are similar to those Vulgaria Knox has identified and which are
characterised by 'competitive consumption, moral minimalism, and disengagement
from notions of social justice and civil society' (2005, p. 34). This provides a useful
foundation from which to explore the questions posited earlier around
marginalisation, politics and the promotion of some interests over others. Such
discussion is particularly timely given the growing disparities in income and
opportunity in New Zealand.
In line with other Anglo-American countries, including Australia, the United States
and United Kingdom, about ten per cent of New Zealanders hold more than fifty per
cent of the total wealth. Conversely, the bottom half of the population hold less than 3
per cent. Unlike other industrialised countries, New Zealand stands out because
sixteen per cent ofthe population own (owe) 'negative' wealth. Comparable figures
for other countries include United States at 8 per cent, Canada at 6 per cent and
Australians at just 4 per cent (Skilling and Waldegrave, 2004). According to the
BigCities Project, on average, $10.00 of every $100.00 is spent in New Zealand
servicing interes~ payments. 50 Such financial burdens have consequences in other
areas oflife. In Christchurch, for example, approximately 25551 people live in
'temporary' dwellings in the city. According to the Salvation Army's report From
Housing to Homes (2005) these figures are set to rise as the cost of renting and home
51 Based on figures obtained from the BigCities Project, www.bigcities.govt.nz
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ownership increases in relation to real income. According to the Demographia (2004,
2006) report comparing the affordability of housing in various cities worldwide,
Christchurch is 'severely unaffordable' owing to the substantial gap between median
household incomes ($42,700.00) and median house prices ($225, 000.00). Other
statistics paint an even more dire picture: The Ministry of Health (2001) estimates that
one in seven women experience domestic violence and New Zealand is one of only
five OECD countries where child homicide figures have increased over the last 20
years (Doolan, 2004). Only the United States has a higher proportion of its population
behind bars.
The illusion of wealth and good health has formed part of Thoms' (2002, pp. 70-76)
discussion of the postmodem city. He noted that changes in production, labour
process, the state, ideology and space have resulted in two distinct lifestyles. First,
there are the 'yuppies' devoted to an 'individualistic lifestyle built around
conspicuous consumption' and who see such consumption as a kind of identity project
(Warde, 1996). The second are the 'underclass of the excluded' (Thoms, 2002, p. 76).
The former are able to participate in the successful, extravagant city of the theme park
(Baudrillard, 1988), along with its cafes, malls and casinos, while the latter are
increasingly asset and cash poor. Thoms (2002, p. 76) noted that this gap is 'masked
by the illusion' of common cultural experiences that frequently dominate popular
media and that use, in the case of Christchurch at least, popular synecdoches like The
Garden City to generate a sense of belonging and shared experience.
In addition to this established branding purpose, economic sustainability is also served
by the illusion of health, glamour, fun and opportunity. As Newton (1995, p. 161)
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argued 'The future prospects of cities and regions in advanced industrial societies
depends on whether they can continue to compete, both locally and globally, as places
where it is attractive and profitable to work and ... visit'. In the emergent discourse
surrounding the so-called creative city (see Florida, 2003; Kotkin, 2005; Peck, 2005;
Friedmann, 2006; Scott, 2006), liveability and quality of life tend to take priority over
genuine discussion about needs and rights based on material conditions (Fraser, 2000,
in Fincher, Jacobs and Anderson, 2002; also Eade and Mele, 2002). Other urban
manifestations support this: glitzy casinos, 'hip' bars and clubs, shopping malls, well
tended public gardens with water sprinklers strategically placed to discourage the
unwary vagrant. While these facilitate a particular version of quality of life that is
consistent with a discourse of global competitiveness and the creative city, they can
actually work against citizens feeling safe and confident because they fail to deal witll
more fundamental unrnet social needs that correlate with violent crime and insecurity.
Though less glamorous than glittering new convention centres and spectacular art
galleries, dealing with such social concerns is crucial in considerations of urban
quality of life. Without a better understanding of these dynamics, we run the risk that
neither the needs ofthe under-achieving under-creatives, nor the creatives themselves
will be met.
Much of this, along with the withdrawal from civil society and the disregard for social
justice, is hidden to some extent by the discourse of urban sustainability which carries
within it connotations of humanitarian concern (Vallance, Perkins, Bowring, 2006).
Though the discourse is ostensibly dominated by bio-physical environmental issues,
to say something is 'sustainable' is to suggest one has at least considered all three
elements of the orthodox tripartite, including social sustainability. This apparent
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philanthropy should be of greater interest to political economists concerned with the
distribution of wealth and opportunity, deprivation and hardship in cities.
An appropriate focus for such concern might include a closer investigation of the
institutions, both extant and potential, with the capacity to address such a range of
disparate issues. Hanson and Lake's view (2000) is that we need to develop and
strengthen those institutions that would help us identify sustainable practices in
particular contexts and learn how to facilitate these practices, perhaps, as Rydin
(1999) suggests, with a focus on how we might actively 'talk ourselves into it' via
institutionalised processes and functions. This is similar to the Redclift's advice of
nearly a decade ago (1997; see also Le Heron, 2006) where he urged us to look
beyond particular aspects of the environment that we will leave to future generations
and think about the institutional setting we will need to create in order to manage
sustainability. He identified a lack of institutions able to cope with the negotiation of
the trade-offs and benefits of different pathways to sustainability; a lack of institutions
able to balance the advantages and disadvantages of the promotion of different values;
and a lack of institutions concerned with actively changing our behaviour. I would
add that there is also a need to redress the widespread focus on the short -tenn, some
of which is institutionalised in annual accounting procedures and election cycles, for
example. This was a strong theme in my own research but Low (2002) has also
identified this as a significant problem. As Le Heron, in his discussion of Red clift's
work has noted (2006), the sustainability literature tends to ignore or undervalue
many of the features of common institutional settings in which many ecological and
economic decisions are made.
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In this regard my research results suggest a need to examine instruments like the
Resource Management Act and the Environment Court, and the City and Regional
Plans and the way these empower, elevate and legitimise certain fonns of knowing,
particularly technical understandings, whilst at the same time devaluing others.
Furthennore, the extended reach of the Resource Management Act, the Plans and the
Environment Court makes it difficult to find other fora in which to discuss issues
surrounding community, quality oflife, values, equity and justice. This suggests a
need to re-conceptualise the city in new ways, and promote the development of
flexible institutions capable of generating novel solutions to these age-old problems.
Ideally, such institutions would need to be able to cope with the messiness of holistic
versions of sustainability and be able to address the conflict between incremental
'muddling through' that parades as rational and considered, and radical or
2000, Yanarella and Bartilow, 2000; Low, 2002; van Bueren and Heuvelhof, 2005).
An emergent, and therefore as yet untested, instrument - the Long-tenn Council
Community Plans that are a new requirement under the Local Government Act -
might go some way towards redressing this shortage. As I write, the Christchurch
City Council is in the process of hearing over 400 submissions on its draft Long-tenn
Council Community Plan. Nearly 2000 submissions were made and this represents an
almost unprecedented level of interest from the public. As the City Council's CEO
Lesley McTurk pointed out, interest of this kind 'shows a high level of engagement
by the community ... about the way our city looks and feels, and the services they see
as important' (CCC website, 2006). The Council's website also states that many of
the submissions (1047) were critical of the proposal to 'rationalise' community
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libraries and the mobile library service. Submitters' description ofthe libraries as
being' at the heart of local villages', combined with their role as generators of cultural
and social capital, is illustrative of residents' resistance to particular technocratic
rationalities that undermine quality of life and the distribution of goods and benefits in
the city. Though the efficacy of the Long Tenn Council Community Plan is yet to be
tested, early indications are that at least this new instrument might recognise
alternative ways of knowing, though commentators like Memon and Thomas, S.
(2006) and Memon and Thomas, G. (2006) remain sceptical.
One reason why faith in the ability of such new institutional arrangement to bring
about change is limited stems from the observation that their normative function is
compromised by the very conflict that characterises much of the discourse and the
practice of urban sustainability (Flyvbjerg, 1998; Hajer, 1995a and b, 1999,2000;
Sharp and Ricahrdson, 2001; Desfor and Keil, 2004). Good communication and
shared understandings form the foundation of successful institutional change, yet
much of my data suggests the existence of widespread conflict, tension,
incompatibility and confusion. Though definite trends are evident - and these form the
basis of my distinction between ecological modernists and those more aligned with
the risk model of sustainability - there is enormous variation in the data from the
interviewees and other texts. The systems of meaning that constitute the urban
sustainability discourse overlap and interact in unpredictable ways depending on the
context in which they are generated and applied. This has led to a proliferation of .
prefixes and caveats attached to the concept of sustainability52, which one supposes
52 'Strong' and 'weak' sustainability are often used here to discriminate between those who put 'nature first' and those who put 'money first' (Urban interest group representative).
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ought to clarify matters but which might actually make the concept more inaccessible
to lay-people and professionals alike.
Bringing the Count!)' to the Town: Nature and the City
With the exception of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (who
published Cities and their People in 1998), only recently has central government
turned its attention to urban sustainability. This neglect of urban areas is no doubt a
consequence of the potency of the anti-urban sentiment outlined in Chapter Five
which saw cities presented as unnatural and 'bad' and the country as natural and
'good'. This is a little ironic given this dichotomy is based on a highly selective,
romanticised reading of nature. White and White (1962, p. 233), for example, pointed
out that much of the behaviour we consider most brutal and appalling is actually quite
natural. This is an argument John Stuart Mill also used:
Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature's every day performances ... Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, bums them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed (in White and White, 1962, p. 233).
Nonetheless, this anti-urban, pro-nature legacy has had an impact on the ways in
which the urban sustainability discourse is playing out here in New Zealand where
two tendencies appear to swirl uncomfortably together. The first is consistent with the
technocratic discourse discussed above where the city is a site to be managed in an
efficient, rational way based on scientific readings of pollution, emissions, residential
densities, reserves contributions based on property value (rather than the functionality
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of the space), and so on. The focus is on the hard infrastructure ofthe city, and this is
seen as the appropriate vehicle through which sustainability can be achieved. The
second trend relates to the ways in which sustainability as an ethic is often tied
strongly to romantic notions of nature as pure, benevolent, and at risk from human
machinations. As a result, the interviews revealed a widespread inability to reconcile
the urban-as-anti-nature and the sustainable-as-technical.
The implications of this uncomfortable tension are important in the context of recent
cyborg-inspired neo-organicist literature where established dualisms, like that of
country-town and manmade-natural are reconstructed in relational rather than
dichotomous terms (Castree, 2004; Gandy, 2005; Marvin and Medd, 2006). Because
the natural and the unnatural co-constitute each other, the city can be seen as a giant
cyborg hybrid of machine and organism that acts as a kind of exoskeleton; a concept
that has become a cornerstone of the emergent discipline of' landscape urbanism' .
Ironically, and of great relevance to urban sustainability, while this exoskeleton
supports city life as we know it, it can also insulate us from a greater awareness of
nature's agency and actively hide or mitigate bio-physical environmental feedback
loops. These feedback mechanisms might inspire a new awareness of the relationships
between people and 'the environment' and lead to changes in everyday behaviour
(Fischler-Kowalski and Haberl, 1998).
There was little data in my interviews to suggest how this contradiction between the
insulating and supporting functions ofthe city might be deliberately and consciously
resolved. It is interesting, however, to note how unplanned so-called natural disasters
impact upon the city. As I write this, a small, rural South Island town called Fairlie
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(population approximately 1000) is celebrating having its electricity supply
reconnected after two days (or two weeks in some parts) without transmission due to
heavy snow. During the same period, New Zealand's largest city, Auckland
(population approximately one million), experienced a power outage of four hours.
Media coverage clearly constructed these events in tenns of Auckland having been
brought to its knees while the hardy folk of Fairlie simply got on with it. This is a
good illustration of my point that the rural is seen as inherently more sustainable in
every way - bio-physical, economic and social - whereas urban dwellers are
fundamentally disabled by their context which is removed from nature, intimately
connected to an unpredictable global economy and where social relations are
characterised by anonymity and anomie. The message from this incident was clear:
the further you are from nature the more vulnerable you are when the lights do go out.
That we require new ways of inviting nature back in to the city is the focus of urban
political ecologists. It is important that equal emphasis be given to both the ecological
and political aspects because, as Clayton and Radcliffe (1996) noted, 'As humans
have developed into a cultural species, we have acquired the ability to regulate the
pattern of interaction between members of the community and its environment via
socially transmitted information rather than biological feedback processes'. In the
city, directly experienced feedback is often very partial or in the form of commercial
marketing such as advertising. In this context, the environmental justice movement is
keen to point out that some sectors of society are more likely to suffer feedback in the
form of adverse environmental effects than others. This happens on a global scale, for
example, when toxic waste is transferred to impoverished countries, but such
injustices have also been shown to occur here in the 'People's Republic of
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Christchurch' (Pearce, Kingham and Zawar-Reza, 2006). In such cases it is not only
nature's agency that needs exposure but also the mechanisms by which some interests
are served over others through the modification and movement of environmental
externalities.
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Chapter Twelve: Conclusion
At a superficial level, the tenn 'urban sustainability' allows us to conveniently and
succinctly express bio-physical environmental, economic and social ideals without
actually having to be explicit about the finer points. Yet the aphorism 'the devil is in
the detail' is particularly appropriate when applied to 'urban sustainability' as
anything more than the most cursory of investigations exposes this concept as one that
is complex, contradictory and contestable. My research has shown that, despite the
'urban' prefix, and a growing focus in policy making circles on the city as a location
(see, for example, MfE, 2002; MfE, 2003; DPC, MED, MfE, MSD, 2003; MfE,
2005b, c and d), the 'urban' condition is largely absent from the urban sustainability
discourse. It is ironic that despite cities being essentially conglomerations of people,
the social dimensions of urban sustainability are generally misunderstood, or simply
overlooked altogether. Also neglected in the sustainability discourse is any real
engagement with the problems generated by the artificial separation of 'society' and
'nature', and the country and the town. Furthennore, vague references to
sustainability hide, fundamental problems around reconciling economic growth and
bio-physical environmental well-being, as these goals are not always - perhaps not
even that often - compatible. Indeed, my research suggests that bio-physical
environmental issues have taken a prominent role in the sustainability discourse, with
their solution often presented as an unproblematic and apolitical application of
scientific objectivity and technological innovation.
If even the more moderate accounts of global wanning, ozone depletion, looming
resource scarcities and waste disposal problems are to be believed, then the focus on
the bio-physical environment is undeniably important and probably long overdue.
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Yet, my research raises serious questions about whether this approach is sufficient.
Certainly the concept's pedigree in tenns of equity and social justice appears to have
fallen from the discourse, as have questions about changing the quality of growth,
managing risk, and merging the environment and economics in decision-making. Less
well-publicised parts of the Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987), for example, also tried
to bring our attention to the consumption practices of the more affluent, the unequal
distribution of power and influence in our society, and the ways in which these feed
many sustainable development challenges. My research has shown that a better
understanding of the social aspects of sustainabili ty is often mistaken for social
engineering. Yet, without a better appreciation of the complex ways in which people
encounter, understand and apply concepts like sustainability in their everyday lives,
many ofthe technical measures concocted in the name ofbio-physical environmental
sustainability are doomed to fail. Another unfortunate irony, then, is that the emphasis
on 'the environment' and 'nature' in the sustainability discourse not only serves
inequities and injustice, but has a detrimental effect on the economy and the bio
physical environment as well.
As a result ofthese deficiencies, I believe that now, almost 20 years after the
publication of the Brundtland Report, the concept of urban sustainability presents us
with two choices. The first, more pessimistic, choice involves dismissing the concept
altogether. My research indicates that urban sus~ainability is an idea that is perhaps
too ambitious and, spread too thinly over economic, social and bio-physical
environmental terrain, has fallen short of its potential. Though the tenn suggests a
balance between the three elements of the orthodox tripartite, my results make it clear
229
that in the cacophony surrounding the term, some voices speak much louder, and
more stridently, than others.
The second, rather more optimistic choice is to engage with and implement the
concept of urban sustainability in a more robust way. This will involve a retum to the
issues raised in the Brundtland Report and address better ways of integrating the three
elements of the orthodox tripartite. This does not necessarily mean a reconciliation of
the different interpretations and applications of the concept uncovered during the
course of my research into one 'true' version of sustainability. Rather, I would
advocate recognising the multiplicity inherent in the concept as it is acted out through
various feats of 'imagineering', discourse and everyday practice. It would involve
taking the best of the different approaches advocated by various interests and working
out new ways for them to co-exist. In this way, 'sustainability' is neither a goal nor an
ethic so much as a process of negotiation, compromise and cooperation.
My research routinely highlighted cases where this approach was not taken, and
occasions that might act as positive and instructive exemplars were rare. The few
instances that might serve to illustrate my point were generally the result of some
isolated initiative rather than a new way of thinking filtering into urban govemance: a
collaborative effort between a real estate developer who wanted to market his
subdivision as 'eco-friendly' and a publicly funded organisation oriented towards
environmental education and awareness; a fortuitous meeting between a City
Councillor and a foreign investor which resulted in improved environmental and
economic outcomes in an area experiencing rapid growth in the northwest of
Christchurch; a Residents' Association representative who perseveres in this often
230
thankless position because of his personal connections at Ecan and the City Council
who feed him 'interesting bits and pieces [he] needs to know about'.
These examples indicate that understanding sustainability as a negotiation between
disparate interests will generate a new range of challenges that go beyond objective
assessments and technological fixes, not least of which will be balancing the
recognition of those many voices with practical action. Rising to this task is likely to
involve the development, or formal recognition, of new institutions, methods,
cOlmections, decision-making fora and collaborations between individuals, groups and
agencies. Systems theorists have long advocated a multidisciplinary approach to
sustainability, but I would go further and argue for an approach that goes beyond
disciplinary boundaries in order to achieve those necessary connections with everyday
life and professional practice. While there are a multitude of possibilities here, I see
new foundations for improved interaction between the public and private sector as
particularly critical. My research suggests that, at present, the relationship between the
two can be quite antagonistic or even combative. As a result, much of the expertise,
many of the resources available to, and ideas produced by, the public sector are
denigrated by private interests as 'esoteric stuff or even 'nonsense'; conversely,
many of the methods and innovations the private sector uses are dismissed by central
and local authorities as mere marketing tools or tricks. I see the potential for
widespread and truly worthwhile benefits to be derived from a better collaboration
between the two, such as those achieved in those all too rare examples outlined above,
including better information flows, improved community support and acceptance of
new developments, better environmental outcomes, and so on.
231
The development of new institutions and methods may have to be accompanied by the
dismantling or modification ofthose already well-established, however. Current
practice in the building industry, for example, is so moribund because of a reliance on
'accepted solutions' , regulations and consents procedures that innovation is almost
impossible, except perhaps in tenns of decoration and stylistic affectations. In this
case, as in others, local and central government agencies might obtain better outcomes
by moving away from their role as rule enforcers and instead don the mantle of
facilitators in the negotiation process, bringing together those disparate voices in a
collaborative effort.
Home to over 85 per cent of New Zealand's population, generators of both wealth and
wastes, physically bound yet intricately connected to range of far-flung places and
people, the city has huge potential in tenns of sustainability. If anything, references to
urban sustainability are more commonplace than when I began my research 3 years
ago. Yet, though the concept continues to gain momentum in the short tenn, there is a
strong possibility that it will become a defunct and meaningless tenn soon enough.
This would be unfortunate because the inclusion of social, economic and bio-physical
elements sets urban sustainability apart from other movements with a more limited
mandate and holds the promise of a balanced approach to urban management. It is my
hope that this research provides some insight as to how the paradoxes within the
concept might be addressed and its promise upheld.
232
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Appendix One
This appendix supports my claim that references to the terms 'sustainability',
'sustainable development' or 'sustainable management' and 'urban sustainability' are
increasingly ubiquitous. The selection also indicates a preference for inclusive
definitions, such as that used by the WeED, i.e. 'development that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs' (1987, p. 40). This comprises bio-physical, environmental and social goals,
however, it is clear that the Ministry for the Environment has been most prolific in
tenns of publications. A perusal of these documents also suggests that the
amalgamation of these three elements is difficult; despite favourable beginnings, such
publications often emphasise one dimension over the others.
Legislation
'Sustainability', 'sustainable development' or 'sustainable management' features in
numerous pieces of legislation: The Environment Act (1986), the Conservation Act
(1987), the Resource Management Act (1991), the Fisheries Act (1996), the
Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act (1996); the Energy Efficiency and
Conservation Act (2000); and The Resource Management Amendment Act (2004).
Governmental Publications
Recent governmental publications with either sustainability or sustainable
development in the title include:
Towards Sustainable Development (MfE, 1992); A document prepared for the United
Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, 1992.
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The Government's Approach to Sustainable Development, (Beehive, 2002). In
Chapter 1: Introduction - What is Sustainable Development -Vision, Principles,
Explanations. we are told that 'for New Zealand the central issues are growing our
economic wealth in a way which enables us to provide for ourselves and future
generations without compromising the quality of the environment'. Social
development must go hand in hand with economic development, and both must be
seen in an enviromnental context' (p. 10). In Chapter 2: Where Do We Focus First,
the priorities are identified as: creating more innovation, more skills, more wealth;
improving the well-being of our children; improving participation of Maori and
Pacific Island peoples.
Monitoring Progress Towards a Sustainable New Zealand (Statistics New Zealand,
2002). Adopts the WCED definition of sustainable development. Statistical indicators
are used to address such questions as 'Is the enviromnent resilient and healthy ... with
vibrant cultural identities ... with living standards that meet the needs of all', 'Is the
economy innovative and growing ... and in balance with the enviromnent ... and
providing work'?, 'Are people healthy and well educated', Are people safe and able
to participate in all aspects of the community now and in the future'. No overall
conclusions are drawn.
The Sustainable Development for New Zealand Programme of Action (DPC,
MED, MtE, MSD, 2003); Adopts the WCED definition of sustainable
development. The Programlne of Action targets five areas: Quality and allocation
of freshwater, energy, sustainable cities, investing in child and youth
development, and measuring progress and updating the programme of action.
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Sustainable Development and Inji-astructure (Maramar Consultancy for MED,
2003). Describes sustainable development as 'a goal that emphasises a long-tenn
(intergenerational) and holistic perspective, integrating economic, environmental,
social and cultural dimensions'. Discusses some of the links between economic
growth and infrastructure, and, interestingly, connects society attitudes and trends
to infrastructure and growth issues. Addresses some urban infrastructure issues.
Other publications that refer to either sustainability or sustainable development, but
which do not include the tenn explicitly in the title include:
The State of New Zealand's Environment (MjE, 1997). Outlines the Government's
environmental strategy, Environment 2010 as incorporating 'new ethical and
ecological dimensions' that are 'explicitly based on the ethic of sustainability
which obliges us to sustain the natural environment not just for our use, but for its
ecological functions, its intrinsic value and its potential value to future
generations'. Interestingly, the report tells us that 'under this ethic, the
environment is no longer the economy's servant but its host, and extinctions and
environmental degradation are no longer acceptable prices to pay in the pursuit of
economic growth' (ch1.2 html).
Population and Sustainable Development (MED, MSD, DoL and Statistics New
Zealand, 2003) was prepared by the Ministries of Economic Development and Social
Development, the Department of Labour and Statistics New Zealand. Makes
connections between the ways in which New Zealand's population will change over
the next 50 years and future development and well-being.
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Simply Sustainable (MfE, 2005a). Aimed specifically at those in business it provides
five steps towards sustainability comprising:
1. Switch off when not in use
2. Green your office stationery
3. Recycle all that you can
4. Choose greener and safer cleaning products
5. Choose energy efficient equipment and appliances
Walking the Talk to Sustainability (MfE, 2006). Provides practical steps on how
to 'walk the talk'. Largely similar to the steps outlined in Simply Sustainable
(MfE, 2005).
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is funded by Parliament
directly and answers to the Speaker of the House and the Officers of Parliament
Committee rather than the Minister for the Environment. The Commissioner's focus
is 'environmental sustainability' (http://www.pce.govt.nz/about/pce _ about.shtml).
Publications from this Office with a focus on sustainability or sustainable
deVelopment include:
Towards Sustainable Development: The Role of the RMA. (PCE, 1998a). Discusses
the purpose of the RMA (' sustainable management of natural and physical resources' ,
p. 2), its strengths and weaknesses.
Creating Our Future: Sustainable Development for New Zealand. (PCE, 2002). This
report reviews New Zealand's progress towards sustainable development, with a focus
on environmental management performance since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro. 'The report highlights the opportunities and challenges in maintaining a
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healthy enviromnent, social well-being, and a strong economy'. Outlines a preference
for 'strong sustainability' which recognises the 'limits within which an economy and
society must operate if we are to function in a sustainable way' (p.2). It is 'ecological
limits' that determine whether activities and interests are 'sustainable'.
Governmental Publications with a Focus on Sustainability ill Urban
Areas
Recent govemmental (including the peE) publications with a focus on urban
sustainability or sustainable development in urban areas include:
Cities and their People: New Zealand's Urban Environment (peE, 1998b). This
reports on the management and state of New Zealand's urban enviromnent, identifies
important issues and risks, 'and poses a series of questions regarding how we may
advance the sustainable development of our cities and towns'. The definition used in
the report is that ofthe weED (1987).
People, Places, Spaces (MtE, 2002); 'Reflects the Govemment's commitment to
sustainable development in urban areas', an approach which encompasses 'social
inclusiveness, economic prosperity and environmental quality (p. 2).
Urban Sustainability in New Zealand (MtE, 2003); An information resource for urban
practitioners. It defines urban sustainability as 'a process of managing urban change
to improve our quality of life by delivering better social, enviromnental and economic
outcomes, for all people, in the present and in the future' (p. 4).
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The Sustainable Developmentfor New Zealand Programme of Action (DPC, MED,
MfE, MSD, 2003) includes 'sustainable cities' as one of its five areas of action. A
sustainable city is not defined, however, the desired outcomes ofthe action are the
development of cities that are 'centres of action and economic growth' and 'liveable
cities that support social well-being, quality oflife and cultural identities' (p. 19).
The New Zealand Urban Design Protocol (MfE, 2005b) including the Action Pack
(2005). The Urban Design Protocol 'forms part of the Government's Sustainable
Development Programme of Action' (p.2). The protocol identifies seven design
qualities fundamental to good urban design: Context, character, choice, connections,
creativity, custodianship, and collaboration. Does not define sustainability.
A Summary o/the Value o/Urban Design (MfE, 2005c) and Urban Design Case
Studies (MfE, 2005d). This publication does not invoke the terms sustainability or
sustainable development but instead talks about balancing 'social, economic and
environmental'. In a pragmatic approach, readers are asked to attend to local
character, connectivity, density, mixed use, the public realm, integrated decision
making, and user participation.
New Zealand Websites
A google search for New Zealand sites including 'sustainable development' yielded
about 998 000 hits, and 'sustainability' a further 155 000 hits. These figures were
something of a surprise to me considering our population stands at little over 4 million
people. A search for 'urban sustainability' generated fewer hits (155000), however, it
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was interesting to the content of some of the sites found as a result. Reurbanise
(www.reurbanise.co.nz). for example, defines urban sustainability as the 'viability of
urban living' and focuses on steps to maintain the feasibility of urban living given the
end of' cheap oil'. In addition, they are preparing for an economy which is shrinking
rather than growing. Other sites included examples of private/public partnerships (e.g.
sustainable.wellington.net.nz), private business interests that are intent on developing
a 'sustainable approach' (sustainable.org.nz, greenfleet.org, nzbcsd.org.nz), research
institutes (e.g. landcareresearch.co.nz, branz.co.nz) and all manner of other urban
interest groups.
These figures and examples add weight to my claim that these terms are now
commonplace. Though a thorough assessment of so many sites was impossible, I
would also argue that allusions to the concepts sustainable development, sustainability
and urban sustainability were, for the most part, rather vague. My evaluation of this
material is consistent with those who claim that although these terms might be
conceptually cloudy and often impractical, they have become increasingly popular
